The forgotten magnum

There's a new blog for .41 Magnum lovers at The 41 Magnum Society.

The text formatting is kinda wonky, but what the hey.

My first try at refinishing a pipe

Details and history at The Briar Files.

P.S. I also got a set of files and a coping saw at Home Depot today. Here's hoping I finally get up the nerve to do something with that ebauchon I've been ignoring for about three years.

After 500 novels and 10,000 women...

Here's an interesting article on pipe-smoking novelist Georges Simenon from a 1980 issue of People Magazine: Georges Simenon has earned his retirement.

Several pictures of Simenon with pipe, although they are not very good quality.

I wish I had a table just to keep my collection so orderly. The article states that he mostly had Dunhills. My favorite picture is this one with Susan Hayward.


Thanks to David Codrea for the email tip.

Disappeared in Connecticut

From the Department of Lesser Evils, thanks to Hartford Business:

Federal officials admit they keep detainees in covert prisons around the world, most notably at Guantanamo Bay, where many were held for years before their names were released to the public.

But it comes as a surprise to some state officials that federal detainees are also held, secretly, right here in Connecticut.

It’s all part of a contract between state and federal authorities: In exchange for a per-inmate fee, state officials agree to house federal prisoners arrested by homeland security.

Connecticut has had such a contract with the federal government since 1995, but it was only after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that new regulations clamped down on information about those prisoners.

According to legal arguments by state Assistant Attorney General Henri Alexandre, state authorities are prohibited from releasing any information about the federal detainees held behind bars in Connecticut prisons.

via Bill of Rights Defense Committee

UPDATE: A rare old Kaywoodie

When he says this is extremely rare, he's not kidding. Very nice. Currently at $83.53, and it's only going to go up.UPDATE: Sold for $499.99.

Drugs & ammo

Interesting finds today. One meter box was being used as a stash/trash can. I had to remove all the trash to get to the meter, and found a small bag of weed under the beer cans. Not much, about enough to fill the bowl of a regular tobacco pipe maybe four or five times. I left it lying in the street with all the other garbage.

In another box, there was a single .38 Special round. Interesting. No way it could get in there by accident. I wiped it off to make sure my prints weren't on it and left it there. Why yes, of course I picked it up. I had to see what brand it was. Winchester semi-jacketed hollow point, by the way.

Last Friday another meter reader found a big stash of used hypodermic syringes in a meter box.

Fun job, sometimes.

Yikes

I mean, holy crud. That's just too freaky.

The only real loophole

Interesting article from The Roanoke Times:

After Virginia closed a loophole that allowed Seung-Hui Cho to purchase his weapons of mass murder, the hope was that more people with mental health problems like Cho's would be barred from buying guns.

That hasn't happened.

In fact, the number of gun transactions blocked for mental health reasons has decreased slightly since Gov. Tim Kaine signed an executive order requiring all people who receive court-ordered mental health treatment to be included in a database used to screen potential gun buyers.

In the eight months following the May executive order, 79 transactions were denied for mental health reasons.

During the same time period in 2006, 85 potential gun sales were stopped for the same reason, according to figures compiled by the Virginia State Police.

As the General Assembly considers bills that would codify Kaine's executive order, it's unclear why his action, taken just two weeks after Cho killed 32 people and then himself on the Virginia Tech campus, hasn't led to more noticeable results.

And then there's a lot of rambling stuff about why this is.

So they go to the real expert on such matters: Ladd "the government must have a monopoly on force" Everitt.

Some say it's too early to judge the effectiveness of Kaine's executive order, considering the short time it has been in effect and the fact that gun sale denials for mental health reasons dropped by just six in the last eight months of 2007.

"I wouldn't call that a statistically significant number," said Ladd Everitt, a spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Everitt said the huge amount of publicity surrounding the Tech shootings and Kaine's subsequent executive order might have prompted some people barred from legally possessing a gun to seek other avenues, such as going to an unlicensed seller.

For those determined to skirt the law, Everitt said, all it takes is a visit to an unlicensed dealer at a gun show [why a gun show? why not a back alley or a deserted warehouse? --ed.] or a "straw purchase" in which someone who is allowed to have a gun makes the purchase for someone who is not.

"Given that there are still loopholes, and ones that you could fly a plane through, there are people who will change their strategy to walk through the loopholes that are there," he said.

Those intent on acts of violence will break the law to acquire their tools of aggression. This is the only real loophole, and all the laws you want will never affect it in the least.

On bears and vampires

I try not to miss a chance to mention a scholarly treatise of vampire lore. Here's a good one from Curious Expeditions: The Whipping Boy.

In the list of stars vaulted into fame during the seventies, he is an unlikely candidate. His lank black hair, unkempt eyebrows, overgrown mustache and stern dark green eyes hardly fit in with the feathered blonds dominating the silver screen.

But along with the bouncy beauty of Farah Fawcet and dreamy teen-idol, David Cassidy, the seventies also propelled a forgotten 15th century Romanian prince into international stardom.

In 1972, Radu Florescu, a Romanian academic and historian, published “In Search of Dracula.” Rather than an exploration into the mythology of vampires, the book focused on the possible link between the real Prince Vlad III and Bram Stoker’s fictional Count Dracula. Thanks to the popularity of the best seller, the historical Romanian Prince Vlad III became a household name. The world now a had real Dracula to contend with.

The article is a good overview of Vlad Tepes, who may or may not have been Bram Stoker's inspiration for Dracula. Recommended reading if you're unfamiliar with Tepes. I do have the book by Florescu and found it very interesting--enough to read at least twice, although it has been many years since the last read.

Curious Expeditions also brings us a little-known legacy of the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu with The Bear Butcher.

Nicolae Ceauşescu was the leader of Romania from 1965 until December 1989, when a revolution and coup removed him from power (and life). Though he spent most of his time in power by running his country into the ground, it was a good time for the bears. An obsessive hunter, Ceauşescu quickly depleted the bear population in his personal hunting reserve. He couldn’t kill bears if there were no bears to kill, so he made bear hunting illegal for everyone but himself. Anyone who killed a bear would be fined the equivalent of an average two year’s salary. Ceauşescu, meanwhile, hung hunks of raw meat in the trees of his hunting ground, high enough for only very large bears to reach. For Ceauşescu, the challenge or nobility of the hunt was beside the point, he only wanted the biggest and the best bears skins. If the skins weren’t impressive enough, he would have them stretched to look larger.

The museum is quiet and empty, all dark wood, fur, horn, and tooth. Most of the trophies are not from Ceauşescu’s era, but from the late 19th century-early 20th century. Entire foxes hang upside down by their feet, while mounted vulture heads stare out over rows of chamois horns. The walls of the museum are simply covered with animals. In the second room, a huge bear is mounted, batting at the air with an enormous paw. Just to his left, the mounted head of a hunting hound is snarled with equal fierceness; the dog was killed by the bear, the bear by the dog’s owner. Both were mounted, one as trophy, the other as homage.

It strike me as very strange that hunters in 19-century Romania would want to mount vulture heads as trophies. The article also serves as a reminder of the bizarre depravities that may be indulged in by an absolute ruler.

Another new blog

Not mine, this time. My best friend, who will now be known in blogosphere as Brer, has started his own blog. Most readers of this blog will probably not be all that interested, since the focus is on collecting action figures. I'm pretty excited, though, and will certainly be reading his entries regularly.

It's at Power Of Babel.

This is pretty cool...

I was contacted by someone from the BBC. It seems they are working on a behind-the-scenes show about Doctor Who and the picture that I posted of John Friedlander as pipesmoker of the week is the only photo of him they could find.

He just wanted to know where I got it so they could get the rights to use it in their show. So I gave him all the info I have. It's from a book called The Doctor Who File by Peter Haining. I gave him all the fine print about the publisher and distributor, so I hope that helps them out.

Do I get to see my name in the credits? Heh heh.

And let's not forget Romney

Far be it from me to neglect pointing out socialism where such an accusation is well-deserved. You (ahem) "conservatives" are leaning toward Romney: do you really want to give him the chance to wreak this havoc on a national scale?

So What’s Going On With Romneycare ?

When Mitt Romney was Governor of Massachusetts, he signed into a law a bill mandating that every resident purchase health insurance or pay a fine to the state to subsidize the cost of state-provided insurance. When the law was passed it was assumed that most people would be covered by employer provided insurance, but according to the Boston Globe, Romneycare is costing the state a lot more than expected:

Spending on the state’s landmark health insurance initiative would rise by more than $400 million next year, representing one of the largest increases in the $28.2 billion state budget the governor proposed yesterday. The biggest driver of the cost increase is projected growth in the number of people signing up for state-subsidized insurance, which now far exceeds earlier estimates. State and federal taxpayers are expected to bear nearly all of the additional cost.

So much for Mitt.

So much for Rudy.

So much for John.

And what was his name now? Oh yeah, Huckabee.

I can't say "I told you so" because I haven't been blogging that long, but off-line and out in the real world I have said it many times: this constant "voting for the lesser evil" is backing you farther and farther away from where you want to be. And now look where it's gotten you. There is no conservative candidate for you to vote for this time. Not one. Of course, if you simply want to vote Republican (whatever that is, these days), you're covered. If you want to vote conservative, you are S.O.L. You have allowed yourself to be lesser-eviled right into a corner and there's no way out.

Actually there is a way out, but it involves punching a hole through the wall so of course it's far too extreme. Maybe even crazy.

So don't surprised when in four years' time your tiny corner of breathing room has become a suffocating chokehold.

And the worst part is, you've taken the whole country with you.

A different take on the recent Negligent Discharge incident

Regarding the negligent discharge that many people have linked to recently, Grant Cunningham of The Revolver Liberation Alliance comes at it from a different angle, and I tend to agree with him.

It's not often someone is willing to admit to doing dumb things:

Once again, I'm going to place the blame squarely on Traditional Rule #1: "All guns are always loaded", or any variant thereof. He felt free to do something blatantly stupid with his gun, because he was sure that he had unloaded it. Since he was sure that he unloaded it, in his mind the other rules obviously didn't apply.

If they did, he wouldn't have pointed it at his leg as he intentionally pulled the trigger! What bothers me most about this fellow's misfortune isn't that he was injured, but that he still doesn't get why it happened in the first place. He is so clueless about this, in fact, that he cites the classic Four Rules of Firearms Safety, starting with the offending Traditional Rule #1 in his article, and explaining to his readers that they should follow them. This is in fact the wrong thing to do, and is what caused his injuries.

He also suggests a Three Rules set of commandments that should be used instead of the Four Rules. Personally, I have always followed this set of three rules without specifically...er...quantifying them. Even a gun that I have personally unloaded and kept in my hand since that unloading is treated as though it were loaded. So yeah, Cunningham's Three Rules is what I already use. I just never really thought about it that way.

Blog post flowchart

Interesting, in a geeky sort of way.

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits -- to You at wired.com.

A ring of unspeakable madness

Cthulhu crest ring at badalijewelry.com. Nice.

The difference

I think (and this is an assumption, of course) that most readers of this blog originally came here for the gun-related content, and that many of you consider yourself conservatives, so you might not read some of the blogs that I do. I try to keep up with several (cough) "libertarian" blogs, and I have noticed a difference.

There are some who seem to think that guns are icky. They don't like to talk about them. When they do, they gloss over the issue and quickly find something else to focus on. They are more focused on promoting hedonistic behavior than they are on promoting actual liberty. Even the leading LP candidate is one of those "reasonable regulations" people. (Spit!) As far as I can tell, the other ones aren't so hot, either.

And then there are others who don't think guns are icky, like Karen DeCoster, who recently posted a link to the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot.

What's the point? Some of those who allegedly advocate freedom are really only advocating the freedom to be a jackass. And then there are some who advocate real liberty. Make sure you are informed enough that you don't get them confused.

Sunday Vintage Pipe Ad (1940s): Kirsten Pipes

click to enlarge

Read this entire ad and see if you don't get sick of the word "scientific." Kirsten is perhaps the king of all gimmick pipes, but I must say they are pretty good pipes. In my humble opinion, of course.

Not every metal-stemmed pipe is a Kirsten. I've seen a few such non-Kirstens that were about as solid as an aluminum soda can. The Kirsten stem is made from machined aircraft aluminum. It is solid and all the parts lock up tight.

The bit has an aluminum rod that sticks into the center space of the stem. The bit is also sealed in with a rubber o-ring. The cap on the opposite end from the bit is also sealed with an o-ring, and is designed so that a slight twist seals the bowl off from the stem so none of the condensed punk can leak back into the bowl before you have a chance to clean it. The bowl has an aluminum fitment on the bottom so that it screws on and off--all Kirsten bowls are interchangeable. You can change bowl size, finish, or even material--since Kirsten also provides meerschaum bowls--in seconds.

The Kirsten is a snap to field clean. Take it all apart and use a piece of tissue paper or a napkin or whatever to wipe off the condenser rod, and run a pipe cleaner through the bit. Then use a piece of tissue to ram through the stem using the rod as your cleaning rod. Wipe out the cap with some tissue and the bowl with a pipe cleaner (or just knock it out, blow it out, and keep going). Then reload and relight. Or you can "rest" your bowl by simply screwing in a different one.

I have one Kirsten, and I like it. It is one of the very few pipes I have that I bought new. I don't smoke it often, but it serves its purpose. Because of all that metal, it doesn't ever get seasoned in the way a briar pipe does, and I use it mostly to try out new tobaccos so I can get an accurate gauge of the flavor.

Realistic targets for zombie hunters

At Zombie Targets. Very cool.

Does anyone else think that "Bob" looks like it was drawn by Matt Groening?

via Conservative Scalawag

A new sub-blog

I have started a new blog to focus on displaying my pipe collection, as well as pipes that I am willing to sell or trade. I also intend to use it to document my adventures in refurbishing.

This doesn't mean I will completely stop blogging about pipes here. I just thought it would make things more orderly to put some of this stuff on a different blog.

I worked on three pipes today, and I will start by talking about them.

So if you're interested, go visit The Briar Files.

Rhodesians

A couple of interesting pipes popped up on eBay.

A solid block meerschaum from Tanganyika (now Tanzania). This is the best-looking Tanganyikan pipe I have ever seen. Maybe that's a strange statement to make, but I have actually had several pipes from that country pass through my hands, and they all looked more or less the same: very small, briar bowls jacketed in leather, with meerschaum inserts. I didn't keep any of them; I sold them all. This one is a big honkin' hunk of meer. Nice.


A KBB Yello-Bole. Unsmoked, the yellow "honey-cake" lining still intact. If you check out the other photos at the auction, you can see the original sales sticker still in the bottom of the bowl. KBB was the company that later became Kaywoodie. They created the Yello-Bole line to sell off their "seconds," that is, the pipes that they didn't deem quite good enough to bear the Kaywoodie name. Since this one is a KBB Yello-Bole instead of just a plain old Yello-Bole, that means it must be pretty old, and almost certainly of better quality than the later non-KBB Yello-Boles.

This is something you don't see very often. I briefly possessed an unsmoked Yello-Bole, but it was one of the aluminum-stemmed versions with a threaded-on bowl, so it didn't really appeal to me. It caused a minor flurry of a bidding war on eBay, though.

P.S. This one (if you want to quibble) might not actually be a Rhodesian. Some might call it a bullcap or something like that. I don't really care.