This is Canada's (and pretty much the British Commonwealth) response to America's Springfield Trapdoor rifle. Unlike the Springfield's 45-7 cartridge, the Martini Henry is chambered in the long obsolete 577/450.
There has been a resurgence of long dead American blackpowder guns and even I have a much loved Remington rolling block single shot. My arch enemies at the rod and gun club all have Sharps and Springfields and we have a ball with them. The old British guns? They are still deader n' a dodo.
[The definition of impractical is] an 1883 Martini-Henry Mark III, seen today at the Gun Show. It was "only" $500, and ammo for it is insanely expensive at $139/20 rounds (!!!). It is centerfire so you can reload - and would want to at that price. Boy, howdy.
Reading Glen's post reminded me of Kim du Toit's Gratuitous Gun Pictures, which captured my love affair with old rifles. The history is the attraction, not the practicality, and Kim's writing brought that out superbly. You want practical, get you an evil black rifle chambered for the poodle shooter. Me, I keep coming back to the Old School ones that billow clouds of history with each trigger squeeze.
The battle of Roarke's Drift ended in a blaze of Martini-Henry smoke as 156 desperate British soldiers showed what fortified positions and brass cartridges could accomplish against thousands of attackers armed with spear and shield.
Valor was present in overwhelming numbers on both sides that day. Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded for deeds performed that day. In that day the VC was not awarded posthumously, and so the count would have been higher had the battle occurred after the reign of the Widow of Windsor. This was the highest number of those awards - purchased with blood, really - by a single Regiment in a single action in the history of the British Army. The final assault was immortalized in the 1964 film Zulu.
To me, there's no black plastic that remotely offers that whiff of history. Sure, they're entirely practical, and I'd want one in a SHTF situation. But I'd love a Martini in the gun safe. No AR pattern rifle ever inspired this:
Glen writes in his post about how the cartridge is obsolete and so you'd not only want to reload, but to cast your own bullets. Fortunately, co-blogger ASM826 has some pretty serious skills in that respect. "Practical" is for ARs; those of us enamored of the older fare must needs adjust. Practical isn't the point, remember.
But the history, ah the history. Kim is back blogging, and I'd love to see him resurrect his Gun Pic List. After all, he became famous as "the worst blogger on the Internet" (as defined by moonbats) for this (among other Double Plus Ungood writings). It would certainly épater lesbourgeois once again. Not that he'd ever want to do that. And maybe he'd write about old school beauties like this again. Want.
Holy cow, I want to do that. Sadly, there are a ton of small children in the village at the foot of Castle Borepatch, so I think I will have to pass. *sigh*
The Belgian city of Bruges has approved plans to build a pipeline which will funnel beer underneath its famous cobbled streets.
Locals
and politicians were fed up with huge lorries clattering through the
cobbled streets and tiny canal paths of the picturesque city and decided
to connect the De Halve Maan brewery to a bottling factory 3.2km (two
miles) away.
It is estimated that some 500 trucks currently motor through Bruges
each year on their way to the brewery, which is a famous tourist
attraction.
Now they will be kept out of the city limits, as the
pipe pumps 1,500 gallons of beer per hour. Construction is set to begin
next year.
What's the over/under on how long it takes before they find clandestine taps have been attached along the way?
I'm doing my very best "Vanna White" Car Show presentation at the Atlanta High Museum of Art Automotive Art exhibition. Good thing there's a great car here.
It's a 1936 Stout Scarab, envisioned to be a Living Room on wheels. It was basically the first minivan, but with style. I posted this picture a couple days ago, but this is the view of the rear.
No, you don't get a view of my rear, although thank you for asking (you perv). Der Wik describes the insanely cool design:
By discarding the usual running-boards and expanding the cabin to the full width of the car, as well as using a long wheelbase,
the Scarab offered a spacious interior. Space was further maximized by
placing the engine directly over the rear axle and moving the driver far
forward, so that the steering wheel was almost directly above the front
wheels. Passengers entered through a single, large common door, and
encountered a flexible seating system, that could be configured in
almost any arrangement imaginable, except for the driver, whose seat was
fixed. Rivaling the seating in modern MPVs, such as the Chrysler Voyager or Renault Espace,
there was even a small card table which could be fitted anywhere among
the passenger seats if so required. Interiors were appointed in leather, chrome, and wood. Design elements also worked in a stylized ancient Egyptian "scarab" motif, including the car's emblem. Visibility to the front and sides was similar to that of an observation car, although rearward vision was almost nil and there were no rear-view mirrors.
Want.
This is Day 3 of the Kilted To Kick Cancer fundraiser for Prostate
Cancer research. If you are of a mind to donate to a great charity, hit
their donation page
(and please make sure that you select Team Borepatch). It's a great
cause - Prostate Cancer is what took Dad - and it's tax deductible as a
501(c)3 charity.
This week, HarperCollins announced that a long-awaited JRR Tolkien translation of Beowulf is to be published in May, along with his commentaries on the Old English epic and a story it inspired him to write, "Sellic Spell". It is just the latest of a string of posthumous publications from the Oxford professor and The Hobbit
author, who died in 1973. Edited by his son Christopher, now 89, it
will doubtless be seen by some as an act of barrel-scraping. But
Tolkien's expertise on Beowulf and his own literary powers give us every reason to take it seriously.
Yeah, no kidding this is serious stuff. Tolkien was a genius when it came to languages - not only was he an Oxford Don, scholar of Anglo-Saxon (the still Germanic Old English root of our modern tongue), but he taught himself medieval Icelandic to read their tales in the original, and taught himself Finnish - a language seemingly unrelated to any other and very, very different from Indo-European - so that he could translate (!) their great saga, the Kalevala.
This is a big deal, as the Guardian points out:
Beowulf is the oldest-surviving epic poem in English, albeit a
form of English few can read any more. Written down sometime between
the eighth and 11th centuries – a point of ongoing debate – its 3,182
lines are preserved in a manuscript in the British Library, against all
odds. Tolkien's academic work on it was second to none in its day, and
his 1936 paper "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" is still well
worth reading, not only as an introduction to the poem, but also because
it decisively changed the direction and emphasis of Beowulf scholarship.
...
Tolkien was often criticised by his academic colleagues for wasting time
on fiction, even though that fiction has probably done more to
popularise medieval literature than the work of 100 scholars. However,
his failure to publish scholarship was not due to laziness nor entirely
to other distractions. He was an extreme perfectionist who, as CS Lewis
said, worked "like a coral insect", and his idea of what was acceptable
for publication was several notches above what the most stringent
publisher would demand. It will be fascinating to see how he exercised
his literary, historical and linguistic expertise on the poem, and to
compare it with more purely literary translations such as Seamus Heaney's
as well as the academic ones. Tolkien bridged the gap between the two
worlds astonishingly well. He was the arch-revivalist of literary
medievalism, who made it seem so relevant to the modern world. I can't
wait to see his version of the first English epic.
