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| Just finished with the pistol, waiting to put up the shotgun target. |
Shotgun ran without a hitch, other than clumsy loads. Need to do a lot more dry work with these
. One of the things that hurt my shotgunning out in Orygun was the fact that most of the stages were predicated toward eight-shot gauges, while my rather pedestrian 870 holds six-plus-one. Shotgun runs that should have ended with a smooth single load through the waiting ejection port to polish off the remaining target frequently ended with "rack-click-curse-fumbleoneintothetube-rack-bang!"Went to the brewpub and picked up a couple half growlers of beer. Bobbi asked if I could stop by the grocery store on the way home. I allowed as to how I might could swing by the mini-Kroger, why? Turns out we were out of breakfast meat.
Curses!
"I don't know if the little Kroger has bacon or not; their meat department is so small..."And so I did. Neighborhood is crawling with tourists even worse than usual for a sunny late-summer weekend because of the painfully-backronymed WARMfest.
"Sure they do!"
"No, I mean bacon bacon. Look, I live in Broad Ripple; my bacon comes wrapped in butcher paper, not vacuum-packed. I'll stop at Fresh Market."
It's hot out there. Thinking about a nap.
Tam,
ReplyDeleteother than the fact that it was the default shotgun of the police, and therefore fairly common, why do people still use the 870, and other pump types? Admittedly, cost is a factor for some users, but the claim that it allows the use of specialty ammo seems like a straw man argument, as that plays virtually no part in non-.gov serious social encounters.
I'm thinking that tradition is a poor excuse for the continued reliance on something that tends to be so prone to user induced malfs. I have a friend who has occasional issues with his 870, even after using one for 20+yrs. (He might be more inclined to use a Benelli, but he lost several new shotguns to the Tritium night-sight business in Las Vegas, that vanished several years ago.)
Which reminds me, do the rules of 3-Gun allow one to utilize the 7+1+1 of the Benelli? Having one more internal round should be useful, if allowed to load one on the carrier.
I have yet to short-stroke a slide action gauge. I have experienced multiple Benelli malfunctions, despite having only shot a few borrowed ones on a couple occasions.
ReplyDeleteTradition? Yeah, that's what I'm all about: I love caressing the warm burled plastic of that glass-filled nylon stock. ;)
For me, price had a lot to do with it. I'm not really shotgun people. This is a toy. It was ~$350 before I started hanging crap on it. Even with the light, stocks, sidesaddle, mag extension, et cetera, I'm still into it less than a stripped Benelli.
It's not the use of "specialty" ammo, either, but the use of a broad variety of regular ammo, from low-brass promo shells to full-house 3" without having to worry about any adjustments to the gun. Granted, modern autos have advanced greatly in that field, but hang a Surefire light and a full sidesaddle on a new M1 and it may want massaging to run with light gamer loads. (Crushing the springs in a vise used to do the trick...)
And it was an open class three gun match. There were guys running X-Rails and drums in Saigas. A Benelli would have been nearly as pedestrian as my 870. ;)
(Benellis, 930s, and SLPs seemed to the most numerous shotguns that I saw at the match. If there were more than a bare handful of pumps, I'd be surprised...)
(I realize I didn't really answer the "round on the lifter" question. Nothing the R.O.s said led me to believe they didn't allow it.)
ReplyDeleteI hear you on the snap caps. I really need to assemble some dummy .38s to practice revolver reloads so I could make a better showing in IDPA SSR.
ReplyDeleteI shoot CDP now and feel like I'm betraying my revolver roots :)
I've had the components for the dummys in a box on a shelf for almost a year now. I've just let other things get in the way.
Okay, I am guessing #OCCUPY_L5 is Tamspeak for Elysium?
ReplyDeleteSaw it last week, and as with District 9 I have the vague feeling that what the director was talking about isn't what most of the audience is talking about.
Well, let's see...
ReplyDeleteUndocumented ships. Homeland Security. Free health machines hoarded by the rich people. Smugglers must get people across the border if only to get a temporary cure from the free magic. Justice doesn't occur until the system is reset to recognize all the undocumented as citizens of Elysium, whereupon the noble (Spanish speaking!) poor are forced to be healed by the free magic of the selfish rich...
Gosh, I don't know what it was supposed to be a metavotehillary2016phor for?
Almost totally off topic, we patronized the Broad Ripple Kroger a few weeks ago for pre-prepared trays of food. I thought your references to BR hippies and hipsters were tongue-in-cheek until that day. I never imagined such a funky scene in Indy. The youngest spotted the train on the wall by the entrance, which made it ok by him.
ReplyDeleteI've also never understood semi-auto shotguns for anything but games. Get an 870 or 500, slap a light on it and drive on, but I guess I need to care about my scores more than I actually do.
Tam, one of the things I did to my 870 was to bevel the edges of the loading port. I used my Dremel, and then smoothed it out with 1200 grit sandpaper.
ReplyDeleteI did it at first because I chewed up my thumb pretty bad during a shotgun course I took, but then I blended it out a bit more, and now I can load it faster,
I wonder if Stevan Marsh is at all related to Salt Marsh of Prenda Law fame... they appear to have roughly the same likelyhood of being real people.
ReplyDeleteYeah, those undocumented persons have overrun the Earth and made it all a Third World shithole. Now they're trying to storm the one gated community left so they can do the same thing there.
ReplyDeleteOops, that's not it... ummmm... MATT DAYMUNNNNN
With District 9, almost everyone nodded sagely and said "It's about apartheid. Duh." I wondered, then why was the present day Black South African government forcing the aliens to live in shantytowns?
Later I read an interview with Blomkamp where he said it was about Black Zimbabweans fleeing Mugabe's shithole and being victimized by Black South Africans. He said the Nigerian gangs preying on the aliens were direct analogs to the real life Nigerian gangs that preyed on the Zimbaweans.
So I'm only suggesting that what we think is obvious might not be obvious to a white SA refugee (Blomkanp lives in Canada now).
Anyway, Matt Damon's character dies at the end so everyone can agree that it's a happy ending.
Gee, Steve. You made me think of the time I went to see The Empire Strikes Back with my older cousin. We had just sat down in the theater when some kid in front of us who had just seen the last showing turned around and informed us that Vader was Luke's dad.
ReplyDeleteI thought my cousin was going to carry the kid out of the theater by his neck.
You know, in some societies it's considered bad form to disclose the endings of movies to groups of people, particularly when said movie is still in its first run
Jon,
ReplyDeleteWhen you reply to spam, it looks funny when I wake up and delete it. ;)
Steve,
I could be more easily persuaded to look for the hidden meaning if it weren't for the constant and heavy handed use of terms like "undocumented" and "Homeland Security". They even had off-the-reservation rapey private contractors from Spacewater or Astrobuton, too! :D That'll teach those Republicans to withhold the magic free health care from everybody!
Okay. So did Jodie Foster's character represent Hillary? Or some sort of blond Blofeldian Sarah Palin?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, all I mean is that an expat Afrikaaner's take might differ from yours or mine. For all I know, Blomkamp might identify with the people on the space station. You and I roll our eyes at "Homeland Security" and private military contractors (which incidentally Foster's character was specifically prohibited from using) but an Afrikaaner might be cheering "Yah! Keep those kaffirs in their place!"
As for the mercenaries, if it wasn't obvious enough with Sharlto Copley cranking his accent to eleven, did you notice the small South African flag on the side of his flying APC?
Sorry Mike, I thought everyone knew Damon's character dies. Otherwise, what reason is there to go see it?
"Okay. So did Jodie Foster's character represent Hillary? Or some sort of blond Blofeldian Sarah Palin?"
ReplyDeleteDidn't represent anybody in particular; I don't think parables have to work that way. If anybody, she was a sort of Cheney/Rumsfeld hybrid; the amoral power behind the throne.
"As for the mercenaries, if it wasn't obvious enough with Sharlto Copley cranking his accent to eleven, did you notice the small South African flag on the side of his flying APC?"
ReplyDeleteAnd the eland on its side. (And accent? Dude, he was singing Afrikaans nursery rhymes.)
I'm obviously not saying Blomkamps's a bad director or that someone's a bad person for liking the movie, Steve; hell, I got choked up right on cue myself at the end, but the morals and ethics of the thing were flat out Grapes Of Wrath in space; it was redder than a Woodie Guthrie concert at an SEIU rally.
Here's some Aussie commentary...
Oh, I pretty much enjoyed it, too. And afterwards I was slightly amused, not furiously looking to beat the snot out of the director as I was after Avatar.
ReplyDeleteI actually liked District 9 better, though. For one thing it was a more human scale, for another the protagonist was not especially heroic. For most of the film he was a selfish oblivious bureaucratic putz and only began to act altruistically when his last hope had been demolished. He was more or less forced into self sacrifice.
Okay, Damon's character was a selfish putz, albeit not a bureaucrat for most of the film. And even had I not already known he died at the end, I would have been expecting it after the first half of the film. Guy had doomed self sacrificing hero stamped all over him.
I don't think parables have to work that way.
ReplyDeleteParables don't. Progressive propaganda does, though. It's mandatory. The lack of an obvious Dubya analog is, I think, telling.
I have been practicing loading the double with snaps and it is not an easy drill. I suppose I ought to get some dummies and try loading dads old 870
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about the Traditions but the Azoom do duplicate the weight of a shell better.
It's not a Bush administration thing, it's a haves and have nots, class struggle thing, both intra- and inter-nationally.
ReplyDeleteIt's Turks/Pakistanis/Mexicans yearning for the Big Rock Candy Mountain that is in Berlin/London/New York and that rich people/societies (but not the ones that produce/direct/act in movies) are denying them.
I'm surprised that the factory workers weren't actually shown seizing the means of production at the end of the movie.
I'm surprised that the factory workers weren't actually shown seizing the means of production at the end of the movie.
ReplyDeleteThey could have just inserted footage of the celebrations on Coruscant that Lucas stuck into his Return of the Jedi Director's Cut. Probably nobody would have noticed.
I hope this doesn't look like I'm picking some kind of fight here, to end with a Tam Interdict, banned from the Internet forever... I just find the conceit amusing that Blomkamp may have had a very different interpretation of his story than the one the H'Wood types he sold it to did, and they talked around each other without realizing they weren't on the same page. I really think a lot of the imagery may be interpreted differently from the different perspectives. Although I also think Blomkamp might have presented a conundrum to he Nice People in the film business, being African and white.
I did read once that the system of Afrikaaner-run SA was "Fascism for the Blacks, capitalism for the English and Jews, socialism for the Afrikaans"
Oh, and incidentally for American progs it's always and forevermore a "Bush"" thing.
ReplyDeleteWhatever Blomkamp is, he isn't an American prog. I expect that were one to actually inquire into his political beliefs he'd be difficult to characterize in our terms. Yeah, he's probably some sort of Nanny Stater, but maybe he'd more closely align with what our media loves to label "conservatives" in Europe. Which is to say, somebody who might have a few drinks with Zombie Ted Kennedy and never exchange a harsh word.