Saturday, May 12, 2012

Saturday Stuff...

To whoever mentioned "C.B. Colby" in my comments section, thank you! I have been totally tortured for years trying to remember the name of those elementary school library staples. It was C.B. Colby books that taught me about such cool things as SEALAB and the M-28 Davy Crockett Weapons System, and helped mold the hopeless nerd I am today.

Spent yesterday morning playing bambalance driver/nursemaid for Roomie. Not having had much experience with people coming out from under general anaesthesia, I was caught off guard by the repetitive question syndrome.
"What'd th' doc say?" 
"He said everything was great. You got an 'A'.
"Tha'ss good. He was a nice man. Di' he say ever'thing was okay?" 
"Yes, he did. He said everything was great. You got an 'A'."
Today? Fun show! Hooray! Don't really need anything, but you never know what you might find walking around. Let's sing the Fun Show Song!
Flintlocks and Flop-tops
And Number Three Russians
Black-powder Mausers
From jackbooted Prussians,
Shiny Smith PC's from limited runs
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Socketed bay'nets
On Zulu War rifles,
Engraved, iv'ried Lugers
That make quite an eyefull
Mosin tomato stakes sold by the ton
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Rusty top-breaks!
Smallbore Schuetzens!
And all of Browning's spawn
I just keep on browsing my favorite guns
Until all my money's gone.

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

RE: C.B. Colby

It's been many years, but are these fairly thin hardback books with photos and short articles about such things as "Old Reliable - The M-14 Rifle" and so forth? My liking for them drove my grammar school librarian to distraction: "Try reading something that ISN'T about guns!"

Anonymous said...

That song crackes me up.
Miss Violet
BTW, thanks for the earworm ; )

Mark/GreyLocke said...

Please tell roomie we're pulling for her. Oh and that she got an "A".

Ruth said...

Wish I got "repetitive question syndrom" from being put under. Instead I get "muscle spasms" that mimic violent seizures....scares the heck out of the attending nurses.

Anonymous said...

Love the Colby books. Skysweeper... Mule... Could never figure out why the hippies didn't want us to kill the commies. Now I understand it was because they were commies too...

And Tam, your cleverness and lyrical talent is unbounded. Except perhaps by topic....

Ruzhyo said...

Came to love the Colby books for the last few years they were around before being yanked off the library shelves. Now they seem to go for $Texas on amazon, alas.

rickn8or said...

Buying Colby's books as I find 'em. Trying to relive a wasted youth you know.

And they don't refer to Propofol as "milk of amnesia" for nothing.

You get extra KarmaPoints™ for the driver for Miz Roberta. But remember for next time that it's a great time to learn new interesting facts about someone.

Free-range Oyster said...

I'm too young for the C.B. Colby books to factor into my childhood, but they sound like they might be worth getting for my kids. My boys love tech and military stuff, same as I did at their age. For those of you who have read them, would they be relevant enough for kids now, or has the information aged too much?

Robbie said...

My wife rotates between riding the fire engine and riding the rescue. She has talked about sometimes messing with the people that are stuck in repetitive question syndrome by giving them a different answer each time.

New Jovian Thunderbolt said...

RE: C.B. Colby

Now I feel I somehow missed out. These weren't available to my childhood, and I KNOW I would have stumbled upon them if they were. How did I miss these. Nostalgia for something I never knew.

Anonymous said...

I love the song! It meters well, and I truly enjoy the sentiment expressed!

Kevin said...

He spoke at our elementary school during the book fair we had every year. Sadly I don't remember much about his visit other them his being a nice old guy. I always regret that I never got the nerve to ask Martin Caidin to visit.

Rob Reed said...

I thought I was the only one who remembered C B Colby. I read all the books my school library had as a kid, and then found more in the local library.

I loved his stuff. He was the "gunwriter for kids."

Thanks for the link to the Wiki page on him. I've searched for info on him on the web a few times and very little has come up. That Wiki was created since the last time I looked and tells me more about him then I ever knew before.

I gotta track down some of his books, but they are hard to find.

Rob (Trebor)

og said...

I have apparently made some interesting comments coming out from under. Propofol seems to cause the best stuff to bubble to the surface. It also has... other side effets, to which I am apparently subject, much to the amusement of the OR personnel.

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

WRT anesthetic: When my wife had her rotator cuff surgery, the first thing she wanted to do when she came out of it was to call her friend Beth. Then about five minutes later she wanted to call Beth. Then about five minutes after that she was royally pissed at me because I told her that not only had she already called Beth, but that she'd forgotten that she'd called Beth twice since then.

She also called her mother twice. She had the phone in hand by that time so I couldn't stop her. Her mother thought it was hilarious.

Good times.

Anonymous said...

Went looking online for any information about the Colby books being pulled from library shelves, beyond the obvious explanation that the society we live in is rotten and decadent. Here's an aggravating result that I got:

Anatomy of a Hoax

Contained in the column on the left side of the page. Some bird named Michael Chabon gave a lecture and suggested in it that C.B. Colby was a fugitive Nazi posing as a Holocaust survivor, Colby being safely dead for 28 years and not available for comment.

I wonder if this wasn't some chickenshit effort to plant the seed in the minds of the book-business set, and create a climate where it becomes impossible to stock the Colby titles. I didn't spend five seconds going along with the childish claim that it was some sort of a prank (scroll down to "A fake Holocaust memoir that never even existed").

Bizarre. Recommended treatment: horsewhips and running the sumbich out of town. A false accusation like that is a damned bad thing.

Maybe I'm biased, but I usually only hear about Leftists pulling this sort of crap. I've been wrong before, I could be wrong about my broad brush assertion.

Mike James

Ed said...

I went looking for information on C.B. Colby, and he sounds like a real interesting person with many careers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.B._Colby

C.B. Colby was also Aviation Editor at "Modern Mechanix" magazine, where in October 1944 he wrote intelligently about aircraft control problems associated with supersonic flight:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/can-we-ever-fly-faster-than-sound/#more

Anonymous said...

CB Colby books, Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD and Galactic Adventures. Three of the most checked out books in my elementary school library.