Funniest guy on YouTube introducing the new Shield Plus from Smith and Wesson. No ammo to shoot through it, but it sounds like a very fun gun. And isn’t that what guns are all about? The comments from his gay following are half the fun of a TFB video. They’re not shooting blanks. But as to the firearm its kind of the culmination of what started 3 years ago with the Sig 365. Sig Sauer came to the conclusion that while an 8 inch 44 ounce 1911 is a great weapon, no one is going to carry that 7 shot classic on a regular basis. They came up with a lightweight (less than 20 ounces) 10+1 super pistol in 9mm and made the other gun manufacturers look rather 1980ish.
Springfield a year later said to hell with that, and they introduced the Hellcat, 1 more round in the same package only barely bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Sig said we’ll do you one better and came out with the 365XL. Ruger came out with the Max 9 and everybody yawned. But S&W really caught the attention of the gun world with the Shield Plus. With a 13+1 capacity, these subcompacts are making compacts obsolete (15 rounds and a lot bigger). The only other pistols that even make sense are the full size with 19 or 21 rounds. Otherwise you’d just go with the micro or subcompact 9mm. Oh, but the funniest thing? .22 LR pistols in the year 2021? 10 rounds.
The newest and bestest! Yeah well it sounds pretty good, and there does seem to be a consensus, so the new Walther PDP full size seems like a fairly safe bet. Guns.com has a couple between $717 and $807. Its worked out well for me once through them (they ship to a local FFL you pick it up from). 18 rounds of 9mm fun. Best striker fired trigger in the business, so they say. Great grip, slide release and mag release work flawlessly. Nice serrations, pic rail, big trigger guard. Reliable. Accurate. In the video above Iowa reviewer Honest Outlaw was doing head shots at a hundred and ten yards with it.
Back in the day for a couple of years I loved to watch the goings on of “Mac & Rachel” in Bay City of Another World, a soap on NBC. I definitely had a thing for Victoria Wyndham who played Rachel. Thanks to the miracle that is YouTube, I’ve been able to watch reruns of these mid-70’s cliffhangers! Complete with period commercials.
Aside from the unexpected, you knew what to expect each day in that world. No one was fat, dumb or ugly in Another World. No one ever had a flat tire. No one worked at the Quickie Mart, they were all doctors, lawyers and architects. Their living rooms were immaculate and their wardrobes were impeccable.
Swear to God the last time I checked in on some nameless soap, the modern day residents of “Pine Valley” or wherever were texting on their phones! Little conversational ‘balloon’ blurbs popped up on the screen so you could read their texts! What a sick world. Back in the day each scene was its own vignette as they held proper ‘sit-downs’, to discuss the latest gossip or plot their schemes!
Society really has tanked. A few soaps have hung on, but its not pretty. Mac & Rachel would not recognize this world. I suppose its why I like the world of the Mierlo-Hout Railcam. It never changes at least. Its also interesting the observations I’ve made about that world (in the Helmond district of the Netherlands).
In Mierlo-Hout most everyone seems to have a good BMI compared to Americans. They don’t drive 20 year old clunkers, I find this very odd. There do seem to be a larger number of bicyclists and pedestrians, perhaps that explains the lower BMI. The walking of dogs occurs, but not like it does in the U.S.
Nor the walking of baby strollers. People don’t seem to be into littering like they are here. I never see trash on this corner or someone tossing a McDonald’s drink cup out the window. At 5 o’clock in the morning here, it is high noon there. You can’t go 5 minutes without a small passenger train or a larger freight train go by.
They give you at least a 30 second warning before the actual train goes by, which rarely takes more then 25 seconds, even for a large freight train. Which brings me to the oddest observation of all. People follow the rules there. They ‘color between the lines‘ as it were.
When the crossing arms come down, they stop. They don’t gun their engines to beat the train. The pedestrians don’t walk around the arms. And when the arms come up, they wait until they are completely up and the bells have stopped before they proceed. There’s no trying to gain a few seconds by not following the rules.
Its a tidy world in Mierlo-Hout, and I like that.
If I hadn’t been kicked off YouTube and had an account to chat with on this live-cam, I’d suggest to those people (the camera has audio too), that they stand on the sidewalk at the bottom of the camera, and introduce themselves. Little interviews and such.
Pick a time say noon, and tell us of their world. Who they are, how long they’ve lived there, what takes them by this corner of the world. Bring a 4th dimension to our 1 camera world. It would be fascinating. Tell us about this other world.
Victoria Wyndham who played ‘Rachel Cory’ on Another World
TCM was showing The Great Race this morning. It only took me 56 years to appreciate it. I just read on IMDB that Natalie Wood wasn’t a fan of it or the director Blake Edwards. Which is a shame, as I have found out over that time that farce is actually quite hard to do. The two principles (Curtis and Lemmon) had a cringe-worthy attempt in Some Like It Hot, where they dressed up as women. That movie just didn’t age well, this one did.
What really helped me appreciate this one, was seeing really bad farce. A guy who made movies locally loved to produce what he thought was great farce, when in reality it was just irritating. Much like the feeling I had when director Billy Wilder attempted it in the previously mentioned Some Like It Hot. Blake Edwards of Pink Panther fame, obviously had more of a knack for it.
You’d think farce was simply getting out there and acting silly, but its obviously much more than that. Just watch any high school play that attempts it, you’ll see what I mean. Its takes a talented director, a good script, and great actors. You’re not going to get over the bar without all 3.
Jack Lemmon has two roles in it, but the one that makes the movie is his rendition of Crown Prince Frederick Hoepnick. “Over the top” does not begin to do it justice. Another unrelated curiosity is Natalie Wood. One of her best performances I would have to say, after those train wrecks Splendor in the Grass and Rebel Without a Cause. But what’s funny about her success, which to a large degree was based on her beauty, it that it was her sister Lana that was the knockout.
Hit and or miss. If you catch them on a good day I’m told they have great customer service. If you catch them on a bad day like I did where they’re just not in the mood to answer the phone (tried for 40 minutes), then you’re screwed. I was rather proud of myself for watching the YouTube videos on how to take the gun apart and find out what was going on with its stoppage. So I call down to Daytona Beach as soon as the phone lines open Monday morning to place my order, and no one answers. So I have to go to a Schluder Shots, a private company, pad the order of the .50 cent parts to get it up to the minimum $20, add $10 for shipping, so I’m out the door for $30, for about $1.25 worth of parts I should have gotten for free from SCCY.
I say all this, because if you are going to buy a $200 dollar gun, you’re going to need a reliable source for parts. Its not like a $575 dollar Glock that’s going to run forever. So if you want a gun that’s hard to grip, breaks, and is unreliable, then the CPX-2 is for you! Since I can’t get parts from SCCY, and the minimum I’m gonna pay from Schluder’s is $30, its going to get expensive repairing it.
I only had around a thousand rounds through it. I really blew it trying to go cheap. Just a couple a hundred more I could a got a S&W, probably run forever. You hate getting this old and still doing stupid things. I’ll make up that $200 in repair costs and down time.
[$30 dollars for used parts. You know in 3 or 4 years when I need to replace them again, they won’t be making them, and I’ll just have a dead gun. I’d almost forgot, of the 2 magazines it comes with only 1 worked. So I paid for 2 more. Of those 2 only 1 worked.]
4/25 update: After replacing the slide hold and slide hold spring, and the ejector, at the test fire it failed with a different problem. The chassis frame below the slide hold arm busted out a chunk. The chassis frame also has a crack now extending from that hole.
Critics loved to hate on the 1980 musical Xanadu. Why? “Rock Operas” were the thing back then. Xanadu by the Electric Light Orchestra, Flash Gordon by Queen, fun little escapist nonsense, so what? There are worse things in this life than a cute little blonde Australian woman that looks good in Spandex, and has one of the top 10 singing voices of all time! It reminds me of when they had the Disco Burn in 1979 at Comiskey Park, to make sure everyone knew you were supposed to hate disco music. Why? When you’re trying that hard something is up.
Dear WordPress: Please stop ‘improving’ things. If you go to the free side of WordPress they go after you with a vengeance. They want to make your blogging experience as painful as possible. Why? If you don’t want to offer free blogging, don’t! Is someone holding a gun to your head? One of the things they do is instead of just putting a small ad at the bottom of your post, now the #2 “post” is a full-width ad obscuring your other posts below it. It makes the reader think you have a 1 page blog. They also took out the “classic editor” so its impossible to get to “categories and tags”, or get the size of your font right.
How do television remote control makers design them so a button or two wears out after a year and no longer works? I first noticed this about 20 years ago and thought myself so fortunate to find a store in Georgia that sold the one I needed. I thought it was dumb luck at the time, now I know its an entire cottage industry. Laptop makers did that with power cords. They use this little 18 gauge wire that is guaranteed not to last beyond a year. Its not limited to electronics. Teflon was invented in the 60’s. The new non-stick miracle cooking pan material, it was good. They soon realized, “We can’t have people buying 1 pan in their life, let’s get it to self-destruct!”
Microsoft does this bullshit by not selling a functional word processor with their computer software. You either have to rent one by the month or buy Word separately (thank God I found out about the free Libra). Everybody wants that recurring expense, after you “bought” their item. They even want you to buy vacuum bags for shop vacs now! It used to be you just shook off the filter, put it back in and away you went! (mine finally crapped after 30 years)
Its all about screwing the consumer with a substandard product. Cars are the epitome of this concept on many fronts. One of those is the “transverse” mounted engines. They’ve made it impossible to do the simplest things. They say dealerships don’t make the majority of their money on sales, but on repairs. Another is designing cars with bare steel on the bottom so they are guaranteed to rust out. Metal coatings the last 40 years have exploded, there’s no reason for this, if there ever was. They could have just primed and painted the bottom side when they made them, just like the topside.
Don’t even get me started on temporary asphalt roofs and 10 year water heaters. No reason for it. But the most confounding (and life threatening) thing I don’t get, is the attitude about vaccines. You saw this 30 years ago with school immunizations. “Everyone has to have them so all the kids will be safe!” Well if your kid is immunized, why do you care about that other kid? Yours can’t catch it? I don’t get it. Now Canada is talking about quarantine internment camps for people who don’t have the COVID vaccine and the US is talking about “travel passports”! Why? Your not gonna die, only the people without a vaccine, right?
Its a hoot when every time Kelly Bundy (Christina Applegate) walks onto the set every male in the live studio audience breaks into a cheer! It must have been an ego boost for her. She has to have some of the most viewed legs in television history. This YouTube series parts I II & III are a joy to behold. She started out the show at age 16. “Kelly Bundy” turns 50 this year, my how time flies. Its says in her bio at the link above, she was the first choice for the Legally Blonde role that went to Reese Witherspoon. She was apprehensive about taking another ‘dumb blonde’ role. As is so often the case, medical necessity has marred the beautiful body, but not her soul.
[Speaking of lewd, rude and crude, Roseanne started just a year later in 1988. They weren’t quite so over the top, and they didn’t have Christina Applegate.]
When I was a kid I caught in reruns an episode or two of Ripcord. I really liked it. The exciting adventures (is there any other kind?) of Ted McKeever and his sidekick Jim Buckley (Ken Curtis). Memories are kind a fuzzy as a kid, so when I got older and nobody else remembered the show, I started to wonder if I had imagined the whole thing! Then 50 years later we have what they call the “internet” and I could research all these things.
I had remembered the very personable Larry Pennell from the popular series back then, The Beverly Hillbillies and his role as Dash Riprock. The person watching a show has no idea what an actor is really like. You just have to go by your gut and reading between the lines. One of the things I read about Larry was that he had 1 marriage his entire life to one Patricia Throop. That says something, especially for Hollywood. He was a professional baseball player for 5 years for the Boston Braves (who became the Milwaukee Braves, and then the Atlanta Braves).
He’s just one of those guys like Ron Ely, Clint Walker, Fess Parker and Denny Miller, that strike you as really decent people. It wasn’t until late in life that I realized that’s what either attracts me to someone, or repulses. One of the funniest stories I heard was when I found out the relationship between Andy Griffith and Francis Bavier. Everybody’s favorite Aunt Bee, just did not like Griffith, and was a real bitch towards him. A few months before her death she called him and apologized for her behavior.
‘Honest Outlaw’ (Iowa guy) in this video goes over why he thinks the Bul Armory 1911 is the best bang for your buck under $2,000. You can spend well over $4,000 dollar if you want to. His video is blasphemous anyway, its a 1911 in pussy 9 mm, not .45 ACP. I just put the video up for informational purposes. Right away he covers the #1 key to keeping your 1911 running flawless: Wilson Combat magazines. I thought I had a hunk a junk in my Thompson Arms .45, all it needed was a new magazine. #2 is keeping a fresh recoil spring in it. You can tell sometimes its worn out when your ejection pattern is all over the place, or becomes limp when throwing out the brass. #3 is keeping your extractor and channel spotlessly clean. I was watching some YouTube where the guy only cleaned his extractor port “every other” time, or once a month. As someone who cleans it every time, I can tell you it is filthy in there after just 50 rounds. #4 is just keeping that puppy cleaned and lubed (light to moderate). Paying particular attention to the feed ramp and barrel.
Iowa life 