Green Hell

Still More Fun

    This is another silly (but incredibly entertaining) toy Mags and I picked up at a gun show: A 4', .40 cal. blowgun. 



   Just the thing for rainy-day amusement. (As you can see, it was pissing down this morning). 

Fun With Destructive Devices

   More kid-in-a-candy-store fun this weekend. One of my oldest friends brought over a few toys to play with. 



The assegai/iklwa is a reproduction, but the knobkerry is a genuine, Zulu War-era antique. 





Another shot of the assegai, with two more vintage pieces: a .577 Snyder rifle and a .455 Webley/Eley. 

"Stop the Violence," My Ass!

My stepson and I, preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse -- and confirming every negative stereotype you've ever heard about the Irish and the Mexicans. The Remington 870 was a real hit with the da boyz (there's just something about .12 gauge slugs that gives every healthy, red-blooded male worthy of the name a diamond-cutting blue-veiner), and the Kalashniklone wasn't far behind it in terms of popularity.

Personally, I think laser sights, optics, and all that shit are for pussies (if you need 'em at less than 400 meters, you might wanna consider --oh, I dunno -- learning to shoot, maybe? What can I say? My father was an ex-marine, and of the opinion that an ounce of proper technique was worth a ton of aftermarket accessories...). But since my eyesight ain't getting any better in my dotage, I might have to resort to them at some point in the future, hence the tri-rail mount on the receiver. One feature I really like about this particular mount is a rectangular channel that allows the shooter to fall back upon the irons when his/her overpriced, gear-queer toys inevitably malfunction. 

Timeo Danaos et Dona Ferentes

    I'll be attending a Hallowe'en party tonight. As most of the crowd is "a little bit country, and a little bit rock 'n' roll," I'll be throwing a curveball by going very European. And that has nothing whatsoever to do with the remainder of this post. 

   I finally got off my dead ass and finished the bucklers I've been threatening to make since spring. 



     These will be used in practice, which means they'll be subject to wear and tear. The greatest annoyance I've experienced in the past is that of attaching serviceable grips, which are the weakest points. Even the best leather, and even suppported by washers at that, tends stretch and rip when bolted directly to the body.  At first, I thought of drilling and sawing (or routing, if ever I manage to find the friggin' router) four slots into the wood, and slipping the straps through them. The obvious drawback to that approach was the fact that the leather is exposed on the shield-face. and a few solid blows -- even from an edgeless "beater" -- will greatly decrease its lifespan. 

   This time, I decided to attach the straps (which I cut from an inexpensive belt-blank) to a pair of $0.99 drawer-pulls, fold them under, and rivet them to themselves. The drawer-pulls are bolted to the body, supported by six washers each. If this doesn't go far enough towards extending the buckers' lifespans (even with washers, the holes will eventually expand through wear and tear), I'm going to try drilling the holes a fraction of an inch larger, and lining them with brass or steel tubing, cut and ground to an exact fit and secured with J-B Weld or "Gorilla Snot."

   I'll let y'all know how it works. 

A Thing of Great Beauty

Pretty cool, eh? It's the spittin' image of an StG-44. From a distance, you'd never know it was chambered for the humble .22 LR. 

Go Tell the Spartans...

     ….That the machairai have arrived.
    
     I’ve noticed, of late, that cajolery, wheedling, and bribery are as essential to a happy marriage as trust, honesty, and shared values.
     A few weeks ago, I developed a hankering for a new “beater” sword. I was hell-bent on buying one, but as Maggie and I exercise joint control over the finances, neither of us purchases anything (aside from incidentals) without the other’s consent.
    My opportunity arose when the poorly manufactured storm door we installed shortly after we married gave up the ghost. Whilst hanging the new one, we noticed that we were shit out of 1/8” drill bits. This necessitated a trip to Home Depot, wherein I spotted several 24” pine rounds. Now there was no way in hell I was gonna pass up pre-cut buckler blanks, and since they were only four dollars and a few cents each (thereby qualifying as incidentals) I grabbed two and paid for them out of my beer money.
     “What are those for, Jeff?”
     “Shields. One for each of us.”
     “Cool! But we only have the bokken and the two-handers. Won’t we need new swords?”
    
     Heh heh heh…. Bump, set, and spike. Don’t mess with the Irish, boys and girls. We’re crafty bastards.
    
     Well, they arrived a few days ago, and I’m quite pleased with them. Overall length is 27” The steel is very thick (nearly ¼” along the spine), a bit blade-heavy (a good feature in a slashing weapon), and the edges were surprisingly functional for “beaters.” Out of the box, they’re quite capable of splitting durians, watermelons, etc., and I’m almost reluctant to grind ‘em flat. I'm halfway tempted to leave them as they are, and reserve them for use on the hacking post. 
     Appearance-wise, they’re exact copies of the swords employed by Leonidas and his Lacedaemonian loverboys (if we're gonna glorify the Spartans, we might as well accept 'em as they really were, right?) in the film 300. Although I have all sorts of problems with the movie (I loathe historical inaccuracy, but that’s for a future rant), I liked the swords. I’ve been in “classical mode” for the last year or so, and as it happened, these were the only quasi-Greek swords on the market that were cheap enough to risk ruining whilst dressing up and playing soldier – or “hoplite,” if you prefer. (And pardon my catch-all use of the term machaira, but if it was good enough for St. Paul, it’s good enough for me. Besides, you sure as hell wouldn’t accuse either of these of being a kopis or xiphos, now would you?) 

Coming Home to Roost -- Very Soon

We're two days into building our chicken coop. It's a simple affair, but it's all we really need for the six birds the City of Roswell magnanimously allows us to keep. Overstep the limit by even a single fowl, and there's a good chance of ending up like the late Andrew Wordes. 

I add that spiteful remark because I was there, perhaps 100 feet away when Andy burned the house down with himself inside. None of the councilmembers who (quite literally) hounded him to his grave via an endless series of lawsuits and harrassment had the guts to view their dirty work. 

Anyway, our coop a two-level, 8' x 4' A-frame with a removable roof and several add-on security features intended to keep the birds safe from predators. We based the design on Cawtaba Converticoops' Urbane Coops for Urban Chickens by David P. Bissette. The project should be complete within another day or two, at which poin't we'll pick up the chickens we bought from my cousin.

Total cost in materials was roughly $100.00, but we probably could have shaved a bit off the figure by scavenging. 

Granddaddy's Knife

I've been promising to post these since 2006, and I've finally gotten off my dead ass long enough to make good on the threat.

Like most of the men in my family, my grandfather Bean was multi-talented. Although economic hardship necessitated his leaving school at age 13 (the roar of the "Roaring Twenties" was completely inaudible in East Tennessee -- perhaps the terrain was to blame...), he never lost his passion for learning. A natural autodidact, he amassed an extensive collection of books (roughly half of which are now in my library) and never missed an opportunity to learn -- or teach himself -- a new skill.

If the 'twenties failed to "roar" in Southern Appalachia, the 'thirties compensated for the oversight by taking a king-sized, corn-and-peanut-studded shit on the region. Economically speaking, we slid straight from the Reconstruction (despite the prevalance of pro-Union sentiment in West Virginia, East Tennessee and Eastern Kentucky, we all got "reconstructed" whether we needed it or not...) into the Depression, without much of a transitionary phase. In other words, the region went from "dirt-poor" to too poor to afford dirt...

Like many of his generation, Granddaddy sought a better life elsewhere when the situation at home became untenable. Whether or not the decision pained him, I can't say. The Beans began squatting illegally in East Tennessee during the 1750's, and I'd imagine they eventually became attached to the place. Stealing it from the Cherokees must have been quite a chore, after all -- and like most Scots, Ulstermen, and Borderers; they didn't outsource their dirty work. Unfortunately, I'll never know how Graddaddy felt about leaving Tennessee. When he died, I was far too young even for it to occur to me to ask him.

Many East Tennesseans, my grandparents among them, migrated to (although some might say "colonized") Southern Maryland. Perhaps it was the area's proximity to Washington, D.C., and the resultuant economic opportunities. Or perhaps it had do with the fact that even Hillbillies need someone to make fun of -- and SMIBs fit the bill perfectly.

At any rate, Granddaddy, packed up and relocated to PGC (which, in the '30s and '40s, didn't stand for "playas, gangstas and crackhouses.") If memory serves me correctly, he spent a few years working for the railroad, and eventually became a machinist.

In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been provoking the Germans and (especially) the Japanese for years, saw a golden opportunity to kill several birds -- and a couple thousand sailors -- with one stone. Although he'd been warned of an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt sat on the information and let the "surprise" attack proceed. This was bad for the poor bastards who ended up at the bottom of the harbor -- but it was good for FDR, good for the economy, and good for my grandfather: "The Penguin" got his war, the navy got a brand new fleet, the economy got a boost, and Granddaddy got a better job machining parts for ships.

Apparently, he was good at what he did. In 1943 or '44 a German U-Boat was destroyed in Chesapeake Bay. (I have no idea how, so don't ask. It could have been anything from a depth charge to a floating mine, but granddaddy never said. I doubt that he knew, himself.) Unsurprisingly, the event was swept under the rug and the story spiked. (It was one thing to have the great unwashed living in mortal terror  of a logistically impossible German invasion. But it was another entirely to let them know that the boshies actually got close enough to send "the Penguin" to the big polio ward in the sky.)

Uncle Sammy lost no time in salvaging the wreckage, packing it up and sending it off to be studied and back-engineered. As fate would have it, Granddaddy was part of the team assigned to the task. When the project was finished, Graddaddy reasoned that the Germans -- bein' dead an' all -- had no further use for the craft, and that Uncle Sambo probably wouldn't miss a few pieces of the original, as he had a brand new one to play with.

He managed to  -- uhmm, shall we say "permanently borrow"? -- a few scraps, from which he made the knife in the following photos. The blade (full tang, tapped and threaded at the end) is made from a piece of the hull. The layers of the hilt consist of glass from the instrument panels, leather from one source or another   -- Upholstery? A dead kraut's S&M gear? (Those Nazis were notoriously kinky bastards, after all...) Or something else? -- and what appears to be bakelite. The pommel is apparently the knob from a rheostat or switch, and the photos are below.

This is an especially interesting shot. Grandaddy obviously subjected the knife to hard use, and I'll probably find myself buffing the scratches away until doomsday. Here's the neat part: as the rust came away, I noticed what appear to be hammer marks on the blade.

An Inconvenient Truth

If you're reading this blog at all, chances are you're not an authoritarian control freak -- unless, of course, you're a gub'mint stooge charged with sniffing out contempt for the degenerate ruling class, unorthodox opinions, and other forms of thoughtcrime. It's also likely that you're hesitant to entrust your safety to gub'mint stooges charged with sniffing out contempt for the degenerate ruling class, unorthodox opinions, and other forms of thoughtcrime. This is to say that you probably own one or more firearms, to protect yourself and your loved ones from criminals, invaders from Mars, and gubmin't stooges charged with -- well, you get the picture. You probably aren't a superstitious, liberal animist either, but in case you are...

Defending the security of a free state is a dirty job, but there are approximately 80 million of us seeing to it. We don't wear uniforms, we aren't members of the so-called "militia movement" (I only wish it was as big and threatening as paranoid lefties seem to think it is), and most of us aren't prone to criminality beyond running the odd red light late at night when no one else is around. Yep, I'm talking about gun owners.

The problem with ideologues is that they're impervious to facts that contradict their precious opinions. And sadly, America is simply rotten with ideology. Between wigged out, reality-denying socialists and wigged out, reality-denying fascists (we call them "liberals" and "neocons" because calling a spade a spade is politically incorrect) objective, empirically observable facts have no place in the so-called marketplace of ideas. On the one side, we have the liberal thought police arresting children for drawing pictures of firearms. On the other, we have would-be hegemons trying to convince us that since every turbaned head on the planet constitutes an "existential threat to civilization," we should flush our civil liberties down the shitter and accept the Führerprinzip until the "long war" is over. 

In this day and age, politics are the new religion, and objective reality is heresy when it conflicts with political dogma. Hardcore anti-gunners already have their minds made up: guns are inherently evil, and should be outlawed, while gun owners are bloodthirsty, irredeemably wicked lunatics -- all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Although there's precious little sense in trying to convince a fanatic of anything through reason or facts, this guy attempts it. I think he's wasting his time, but he's doing it for a good cause. More power to him.

Good News, Bad News

I'll break the bad news first: Still no sign of the Patriot War College. At present, I can't find the site anywhere.

The good news: Total Resistance has resurfaced again, under yet another name. You'll find them at this address.

To the National Rifle Association: Kiss My Ass and Bark at the Hole!

I'll keep this one short and sweet.

I'm sick of you NRA assholes telephoning me at all hours, inundating my mailbox with alarmist propaganda, and otherwise shitting on my riff.

Yes, I know the Democrats are in power. Yes, I know they want to confiscate my guns, turn me queer, put an aborted fetus in every Frenchman's pot and force me to worship Martin Luffa King Jr.

Glad you finally figured it out, boys. Authoritarian extremism ain't pretty, now is it? It's a crying shame that it didn't occur to you when your beloved Republican Party took to wiping their asses with the Bill of Rights in the aftermath of 9 Sep. '01, though.

My questions for you scumbags (and I consider anyone who puts politics, philosophy and/or ideology above TRUTH an irredeemable scumbag) haven't changed since I began telling your intrusive, telemarketing shills to fuck off last year:

1.) If you really support the Second Amendment, why not live as if you do? Let 'em pass laws until hell freezes over: paper doesn't confiscate weapons, human beings do. (See below.) Then let 'em try to confiscate your guns. You're an "armed citizen," right? What are you worried about? You're a big, tough, bad-ass latter-day minuteman, aren't you? You're not some overweight, flabby-muscled, pampered "cheese-eating surrender-monkey." What chance does tyranny stand against an army of "great Americans" like you?

2.) Since Pelosi, Reid, Clinton and Schumer won't be confiscating your weapons in person, why do you worship cops and soldiers, to whom the task will ultimately devolve? Do you really believe that they're champions of the Constitution, or has it occurred to you that their job is to obey orders -- and to maintain order at any cost? Do you really believe that when threatened with court martial, summary execution, or dishonorable discharge, they'll bite the hand that feeds them by refusing to drop the hammer on you?

3.) If you're as dedicated to the cause of freedom as you claim to be, why did you remain silent when the so-called "patriot act" was passed? Why won't you print even the first article thereof in American Rifleman? Are you cowards, liars, idiots, or a combination of the three?

4.) Given your well-established role as Repbulican Party lapdogs, why is it that the so-called "Republican Revolution" (with its attendant "Contract on -- uhm, I mean with -- America"), eight years of Republican dominance in the House and Senate, and a two-term Republican presidency didn't advance your putative cause?

5.) Why do you consistently support anti-gun, neocon "chickenhawks" over principled, freedom-loving candidates -- as long as the former class of carrion-eater toes the Republican Party line and supports the so-called "war on terror"?

Hey, LaPierre! I'm not worried about losing my weapons to Osama fucking bin Laden or the ghost of Saddam fucking Hussein. I'm worried about losing them to the Allgemeine ATF during a warrantless, "no-knock" search while I'm at work. I'm worried about having my wife, my mother and my dog gunned down in the dead of night by faceless, mindless, trigger-happy antichrists in balaclavas, urban camo and "fritz" helmets -- all because someone of YOUR ilk suspects me of "thoughtcrime."

I can imagine ol' Wayne's respose, even as I type:

"That's absurd. It's so ridiculous; there's no point in disussing it. And if you bring it up again, we'll send a SWAT team around after you, Mr.---- 'Bean', is it?

Hmmm... Well let me tell you something, Bean: Charles Krauthammer's writing a long, detailed piece on the Scots-Irish attempt to convert the Cherokees to radical Islam, and the historical connection to the Papist-Protestant 'axis of evil.'

Who do you think you're fooling, Bean? We all know that 'teig' is a code-word for 'Sunni' and 'blackmouth' is a code-word for 'Shi'ite.' We also know that you were 'in like Flynn' with those Goddamn Buddhist Manchus, to boot. Yeah, sure you hated each other or were barely aware of each other's existence -- or so you'd have us think! But WE know the truth! You hate us worse! It's all an act! You're either with us, or against us! And since neutrality is impossible when good and evil stand opposed (and don't try pulling any of that Christian mumbo-jumbo about dust motes, beams, casting stones and original sin -- we're wise to that ploy...), you must be against us!

Admit, it: your kind hated the British and the Chinese for their freedom! And you hate us for our freedom -- especially the freedom to force you to do as you're told. You've been at war with us for years -- and we didn't get it until 9/11."

Granted, that sounds more like Sean Hannity than Wayne LaPierre, but I hope the Gentle Reader gets the point...

5.) How dare you assume that former NRA members like me have washed our hands of you out of mere ignorance or/and apathy? Has it ever occurred to you that your utter lack of principle and your penchant for insulting our intelligence (comparing Ron Paul's voting record on gun-issues to John McCain's, for example, requires a mere click of a mouse) might have driven us off?

In closing, Iet me say that when you answer my questions, divorce yourselves from party politics and Capitol-Hill schmoozing, and go back to being a "single issue" organization, i.e., one dedicated to preserving a man's right to self-defense in a dangerous and uncertain world, you may contact me at will. Until that day dawns, though, I cordially invite you to go fuck yourselves.

Up Yours Truly,

DAVID JEFFERSON BEAN

Gettin Medieval on Yo' Ass

Here's one for y'all to check out.

He's a bro of mine from "across the pond," and he takes his sharp, pointy objects very seriously.

His site has the "Green Hell Seal of Approval."