No comparison from the old Smith and Wesson revolvers to the new. You’re paying more and getting less. They can keep them. Just tired of it. You pay a $1,000, $1,200, $1,500, and for what? Less durable, less finished. Smith hit a billion in sales last year for the first time. Know what they’re doing with their pandemic profits? Buying better machines? Bonuses to employees? Cutting prices on products? Nope. Stock buybacks to benefit senior management.
If it wasn’t for my taste in incredibly bad movies, I never would have known about Israeli actress Daliah Lavi (Levenbuch). Around 1960 she spent her 2 years in the IDF. Hooey. The bad (horrible) movie was Matt Helm: The Silencers. When I first saw the dark skinned beauty I thought it was Claudia Cardinale (picture bottom). I kept noticing Daliah’s overbite and looked the film up and that’s when I found out it wasn’t Claudia. I couldn’t even stand Matt Helm movies as a kid. Their good point is they do feature loads of attractive women (Stella Stevens) in bustiers and bikinis.
As she neared 40 and her acting career self-destructed she had a long singing career in Germany no less among other places. Married 4 times. Born October 12, 1942. Died at just age 74. Seems odd for her film career to dry up at just age 30, especially being an Israeli and all. Looking at her movie credits it looks like the entertainment industry did what they usually do, they had her slated for the sexpot roles and little else.
I think the difference between the two is that while Daliah would rev men’s engines, Claudia would melt men’s hearts.
In probably one of my dumber moves I sold a Ruger Security Six in .357 magnum. So now in the midst of an ammo shortage I realize I have enough .38 Special brass and bullets to fight a war on two fronts. And a Chief seems a really good way to do that.
When I got my .22 LR semi auto rifle in a fit of clarity I chose to keep the ‘zero’ by only shooting CCI Stingers out of it. And as an added benefit being a rifle it takes advantage of the extra punch provided by the 1,640 FPS Stinger.
If you look at the hottest new guns the high capacity micro compacts, something soon occurs to the rimfire shooter. As these new 9 mm’s up their capacity to 13, 14 and 15 rounds, the guns made for the minuscule .22 LR cartridge are still limited to 10 rounds.
Speaking of the micro compacts, the Smith & Wesson Shield Plus is all the rage because after a hundred years they managed to make a semi auto that works in all the major areas: trigger, grip, sights, capacity and reliability. Bout time.
And why are gun-makers like Taurus and Rossi so shortsighted they won’t make spare magazines? If they understood at all the hoardy/preppy nature of gun owners they’d know we would easily buy 3 extra magazines per gun. At $20 bucks a piece for 3 guns that’s $180 bucks in magazines on a $250 dollar gun. Are you out to make money or not?
Having no idea what the trigger was for a 25 year old TV show, it occurred to me Party of Five brought a lot of heat for just 1 show. Jennifer Love Hewitt? Lacey Chabert? Neve Campbell? All on 1 show? I never even heard of it back in the 90’s. I suppose what makes it stick out even more is the dearth of programming today. There are people who find it difficult to tell Jennifer and Lacey apart (I always felt that funny). I didn’t know Neve was so much older (1973). I knew Jennifer and Lacey were 3 years apart (’79 & ’82). I had gotten the Season III DVD, there’s a scene of Jennifer at some college thing and she’s wearing this short plaid skirt. It reminded me there was a reason she was a pretty hot item. But anyway, another funny was the last names of the 2 guys on the show: Fox and Wolf. Just seemed funny. Campbell is Canadian. JLH seems like a riot. I felt so bad a few years ago when the Enquirer caught her at the beach and she hadn’t kept the body she had at 19. Who has? But anyway, there are lots of shows with lots of beautiful women, but for me, they can’t be obnoxious and irritating. And these 3 seemed really nice. I suppose Charlie’s Angels is the only other show to match the heat this one had.
The North American Arms mini revolver has probably been around as long as I’ve been alive. When you’re younger and know everything (know nothing), you dismiss them out of hand. You believe idiots who say things like, “You shoot somebody with a .22 you’re likely to piss them off!” Nobody ever volunteers to show us how .22 LR rounds bounce off the human body of a tough guy.
Because of recent relaxation of “right” to carry laws we have large numbers of very well armed people running around the Midwest, where they hardly ever need to be armed. And city dwellers, who actually need to be armed, can’t be so legally. C’est la vie. But to the revolver at hand. These are 5 shot single action revolvers in .22 LR or .22 Magnum. Kind of an interesting little concept.
They are inexpensive (during normal times anyway) and infinitely concealable. Much much more so than say the Bond Arms “derringer”. Those 2 shot guns are literally bigger and heavier and just as expensive as a 13 round P365 or Hellcat. It makes no sense to carry one of those. But! These NAA guns are about the same mass as a Taurus PT22, a semi auto with 9 rounds. But frankly I think the NAA would be more reliable.
[Having watched a few more videos on the NAA, there is a small rod that has to removed and installed that releases the cylinder to reload. Doing that requires you to have your hand in front of the barrel when putting in a loaded cylinder. It works, but it violates Rule #1.]
Love the man. He came through the fire. And because he knows Jesus, he won’t have to go back through. What a tone he had. Was one of the best.
James Reeves is one of the Top 5 gun reviewers on YouTube, though I think his characterization of the Taurus Judge as a “redneck boner machine” was a little harsh (if funny). That bit comes shortly after the 6:00 minute point and does indeed feature a redneck standing in the woods in nothing but his boxers and his boots wielding not 1 but 2 Taurus Judges and firing them simultaneously. Thankfully the state of the aforementioned erection is left to the imagination.
Personally I like the Judge. A hundred years of record keeping on civilian involved shootings has revealed the ‘3-3-3’ rule: 3 feet, 3 shots in 3 seconds. The Judge fits that bill, and well. These yahoo reviewers like to take it out to 25 yards and say, “See that .410 doesn’t pattern!” At that distance its pattern is off the paper. And a barrel that can handle .45 Colt and .410 gauge is definitely not “match grade”. But if you’ve seen the video of what triple 0 buck does at 9 feet to ballistic gelatin you become a believer real quick.
Most people will never see a personal defense shooting, and if they did it won’t be trading bullseye’s at 50 yards. It will be quick and dirty at 5 feet. And at those distances there’s not 2 better rounds than those. No sir. Its a 5-yard gun. It can’t do what a 50-yard gun can. And they can’t do what the Judge does at 5.
The other thing that’s interesting about the video is his number 1 pick for most overrated: The Walther PPK. That’s right, the ‘James Bond’ gun. Horrible trigger, sights, ergonomics, weight and questionable reliability, why has it been touted all these years as a great gun? Why is he the first guy to be honest?
Thunder Afloat (1939) was on TCM this morning, starring Wallace Beery and Virginia Grey. It was one of those ’30s movies where the women talked in a machine-gun staccato and called their dad ‘Pop!’. I like to get the background on movies I watch so I looked it up on IMDB. Turns out Wallace Beery was a complete asshole. Jackie Cooper (the boy in the picture who made 4 films with him), said as soon as the cameras were off he dropped the facade and treated him like a dog. He said the persona of Beery as a rough around the edges love-able mug with a heart of gold was complete crap. He said when Beery died “they couldn’t find 8 men to carry the casket“.
When he worked with 16 year old Mickey Rooney, there was a scene where the big man was supposed to ‘slap’ Rooney. Only he used his full force and knocked Rooney to the ground. The director took him aside and told him if he did anything like that again “some lighting equipment might fall on his head accidentally“. In a match made from hell he was married briefly to Gloria Swanson, who said of the uncouth lout, “He was invited to the nicest homes in Beverly Hills – once.” In the 1984 book Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, child actors said the two stars they hated to work with most were W.C. Fields and Wallace Beery.
The more I find out about “old Hollywood” (or new for that matter), the less I like it. What they did to children and animals was inexcusable. All they did was chase a buck and work tirelessly to maintain this wholesome veneer. For every good story of the “old days” (Clark Gable who joined the service in WW II and was being given the royal treatment, one day in the barracks took off his toupee and removed his false teeth and said, “How’s this for the ‘King’ of Hollywood?”), there are 10 bad ones. Which could all be overlooked but for 1 reason: Those movies greatly influence the culture in America, and those are not good movies.
She has exactly the exotic good looks and captivating accent you’d expect for someone born in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and who grew up in France. I just happened to have remembered her when I popped in a DVD of a 10 year old movie last night. One of the movie previews was of The Artist (2012). It put her on the map and was a thoroughly enjoyable “silent movie”. Her costar was a Fredric March lookalike who was fun, but she held the screen. The movie was essentially written for her by her husband.
Her IMDB bio has a lot of “reading between the lines“. If I understand her career path correctly, she was more interested in quality of work rather than quantity. She explains more about this in a recent video interview from Variety. The side benefit is you can stare at that face while immersed in her accent. The crime of course is how much we’ve missed and will never see of incredible talent such as hers and similar actresses like Nina Hoss. Hollywood has such a monopoly here that they jealously guard with every fiber of their no-talent being between production, distribution and marketing.
If they don’t want you to see a movie, chances are you won’t. A foreign film will be released to about 70 art houses across the country for 2 weeks and then it will be gone. 1 foreign film will be recognized by the Oscars and Americans will never see the hundreds of others released each year. Hollywood doesn’t own the rights to them. Therefore they use the power of their vertical monopoly to make sure you never do. I first saw this in operation about the same time as that 2012 time period.
A Danish film came out called The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Noomi Rapace). So few Americans saw the foreign version with subtitles, that when Hollywood did their “copy and paste” job with their version, Americans thought it was original material! Ha! Hollywood hasn’t had an original idea in 40 years (since 1977). My point of all this is after you see and listen to Berenice, Nina and Noomi, you start to wonder, how many other European actresses of incredible talent and beauty have I missed because of our closed movie system?
Moments in time. There’s a great article here at Louder Sound dot com that really sets up the backstory of the performance. There’s a YouTube channel (Wings of Pegasus) that breaks it down musically. Why all the attention to one song? It changed their life and was the forerunner for a whole new style of music that would be coming in 10 years, punk rock / new wave / alternative rock that was coming. The times they were a changing. How momentous the whole thing was is evidenced by the title quote of this post. A rain delay had put their performance on in the middle of the night. Relatively no one saw it. It was only a year later when the Woodstock movie came out that it put the group and the performance on the map. This sound wasn’t heard in 1969. It was new. Plus you got a British white guy singing the blues as well as anyone. What I like about the article was how it tells about bands after that who didn’t want to come on after these guys. They were so high energy and advanced musically they made the next group on look bad.
““You had police with guns, and cotton wool in their ears, sneering at the band and looking for half a chance to beat up the audience. It was awful. It had all gone wrong and I was thinking, what the fuck am I doing here?”
And when that Woodstock movie put them on the map, and their careers should have been put on cruise control, and the previous 10 years of apprenticeship pain should have been forgotten, what destroyed it all? What always does with musical groups: Ego. Alvin was the singer, songwriter, lead guitarist, he got all the attention. And drugs and alcohol. Same story, different people. All the things that could have been. “Initiate self-destruct sequence.”
Before the collapse Alvin had become the typical prima donna and vetoed the follow up to their mega hit I’d Love to Change the World, with Tomorrow I’ll Be Out of Town. Record exec Clive Davis (who later guided Peter Frampton’s stellar career) said to hell with you then, and they were soon “Johnny Bravo’d” (they found somebody else to fit the suit). 2016 interview with bassist Leo Lyons.
[‘I’d Love to Change the World‘]
Iowa life 