Dog, Sick As A

Sorry, folks, but last Friday the roof caved in on me:  post-nasal drip, barking cough, sore throat with a side order of conjunctivitis (a.k.a. “pink-eye”, for those of a non-medical bent).  Oh, and my speaking voice disappeared into a spectral whisper / ghastly croak, and has not yet returned.

Everything that has appeared on this website since Friday was written prior to that.

Saturday off to the doc for tests, not Covid, not flu, not pneumonia.  Doctor’s opinion:  “It’s a cold.  But it’s a really bad cold, maybe the worst cold I’ve seen in a patient so far this season.”

Upshot:  haven’t been able to sleep for longer than an hour (cough), haven’t been able to read anything, can’t watch TV, don’t feel like writing anything either because everything in the news just makes me want to go to the range and blast off 200 rounds and I can’t even do that.

I’ll try to do better tomorrow.

Here’s a pic of the Usual Rubbish, just to tide you over.  Feel free to discuss in Comments;  just know I won’t be reading it for a while, so behave.  Common thread:  French stuff.

MAS-49 (7.5x54mm)

Carla Bruni

Not Surprising

There’s another one of those (I suspect) A.I. videos talking about the ten guns that are sitting unsold on shelves, and have been almost since their introduction to the market.

There are a couple of obvious losers — the Remington R51 9mm, for example, which was the harbinger of the downfall of the once-great company because it was a shoddy, badly-engineered piece of junk (very much like the company).

The next were those which somehow thought that an expensive 5.7mm bullet was just the thing that the market wanted, and tied that belief to their launch in $900+ guns that were too bulky to carry and too flimsy to be serious rifles.  They were, in essence, expensive range toys, and in the post-Covid years were precisely what the market did not need.

In fact, “expensive range toys” is a pretty good description of most of these ten stinkers.  In saner times, one would have hoped that cooler heads in Marketing would have figured out that mistake;  but there weren’t sane times, anything but.  They were the early Biden-Covid years, when the feral ATF, FBI and Department of Justice looked for any excuse to deny gun owners guns, take away their guns and criminalize gun owners.  And the Covid-era panic buying of toilet paper (FFS) was a perfect companion to the rush to buy guns, any guns, by people who didn’t know anything about guns, where price hikes followed shortage as inevitably as night follows day, where dropping $3,000 on a semi-auto piece of crap seemed an obvious ploy to increase profits, or to plug up a gap in a gun manufacturer’s product portfolio.

Meanwhile, the real gun buyers — guys like most Readers of this website — didn’t fall for any of this nonsense, and spent out money (if we did at all) on proven guns and, while gritting our teeth, insanely-expensive ammo.

Then the waters started to recede, Covid panic ended, and suddenly gun dealers were confronted with a plethora of guns to be sold on consignment, as the panic buyers turned into gun-free zones as before.  Many gun stores which previously had not offered consignment sales now realized that there was money to be made in the commission business as a way of keeping the doors open.

Of course, the idiots who’d purchased awful guns like  like our top ten rascals in the video handed in their geegaws, and now the dealers were left with cluttered shelves full of expensive range toys which nobody wanted.

So when the godless gun-grabbers of the Biden Party lost the White House, the gun market as a whole cooled off, as always happens when the Happy Times return and people are no longer thinking they need to gun up in case of you-know-what.  It happened after Obama was term-limited out of office and conservative voters made sure that Hillary Fucking Clinton didn’t get to play her little Commie reindeer games, and one would have thought that gun manufacturers would have learned their lesson, but of course they didn’t because that has to be the only reason they launched those terrible guns.

It’s funny;  I looked at all the guns on the list, and realized that I, as big a gun lover as exists anywhere in the universe, wouldn’t be interested in any single one of them now, even as a gift let alone at their severely-discounted-but-still-insane prices.

Screw that, and them.

(Read the comments from @reaver6666 in the video’s comments for an excellent overview of the products’ common failings.)


By the way, there’s another A.I. crappy that breathlessly announces that these are the 12 guns you can buy on the cheap.  Yeah, right.

Les Mots Justes

Renee Good’s last moments revealed as woman suffered FOUR gunshot wounds during deadly clash with ICE

…giving rise to the old expression, “Good shooting, Tex!”  Four shots inside a couple of seconds?  Dude!

I have no sympathy, none at all, for these idiots who are prepared to turn themselves into movie props for the anti-American cinema show being produced by HateAmerica Inc. (Executive [sic] producers:  George Soros, Tim Waltz, AOC, Ilhan Omar etc. etc. etc.)

It’s one thing to get violent with the federales when they’re doing something illegal and/or un-Constitutional, e.g. engaging in mass confiscation of guns from otherwise law-abiding citizens.

But ICE is simply following the law, which states quite clearly, “If you’re here illegally, you’re gonna get deported.”  (Trump addendum: “…and even more quickly if you’ve committed other crimes.”  Which we voted for.)

At some point in the near future, some Lefty mook is going to bring a gun to the movie, and I fully expect — and hope — that when that happens, the full force of the law attacks this bunch of Commies like a rabid Rottweiler, chewing up not only said mook, but following the trail of money and chewing up the rest of this foul pestilence on our country.

RFI: OS

As someone who is actively looking to do this, can someone please explain the last panel to me?

…because I don’t understand the iconography.  What are the products?

#StupidOldFart #OutOfTouch

Classic Beauty: Melina Mercouri

I always worshipped Greek actress Melina Mercouri, ever since I saw her in the brilliant 1960 movie Never On Sunday.  I have no idea how I got to see it during that year, being only six years old, but my memory is watching it at the drive-in theater while my parents snored on the front seat of the car.  The subject matter and storyline would have horrified my mother, had she been awake:  the promiscuous prostitute who was being swayed from her debauched life by some goody-two shoes American, with loud and sometimes violent opposition.

I didn’t understand any of it, of course, being only six years old.

But I fell in love with Melina’s character:  her blonde hair, her huge, flashing eyes, that wide, sensuous mouth and her fiery spirit.  (I adore Italian actress Anna Magnani for precisely the same reasons.)

The thing is that Melina wasn’t really acting.  When the “colonels” came to power in Greece, overthrowing the elected government of the time, she went crazy in attacking them.  And when they revoked her Greek citizenship, her response was classic:  “I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek.  They were born fascists and they will die fascists.”

Then after sanity prevailed and democracy returned to Greece [irony alert], she was made Minister of Culture — the first woman in male-dominated Greek politics ever to reach Cabinet rank.  She stayed in that position for eight years, most probably because by then she was an icon, and everybody was probably too afraid to oppose her.

And now on with the show:

Color?  Of course:

And here she is, going Full Melina:

Magnificent.  And scary.  And, of course, sexy as all hell.