Weapons Man

“Tastes like chicken.”

There’s really a discount on this one now. Slightly used.

We refer, of course, to the attached presentation on toxic leadership.

We’ve all seen the show.

We’re going to take a short break from looking at the fort’s construction and history at Castillo de San Marcos in Jacksonville, and look at another angle, if a slightly queasy-making one: what the modern surgeon was using in the 18th Century or so. When OTR visited, a volunteer reenactor had a display of surgical instruments. Later, we’ll return to the mechanics of fort and firearm, we promise, but for now we are going to divert ourselves with a look at the instruments that might have been applied to you if you had the poor fortune to catch a musket ball, met the pointy end of a bayonet or edge of a sword, or had your butterfingered buddy drop an iron cannonball on your foot during, say, the siege of 1702.

Planet Aid Charity bin. (Not the mishap bin).

These things look like they came out of some Hollywood prop shop for an Indiana Jones reboot. Or something like that. But they’re real, these combat tricycles, and they have a story.

This image comes to you from the US Cyber Command’s booth at the AUSA convention, basically like SHOT show for the Army, complete with a keyword where the Chief of Staff sets the tone and introduces the buzzwords for the next year.

The single slithery snake slid silently south. Slowly sidewinding, softly sighing, sadly seeking succor.

Several soreheads sought to sink the snake. Snakes are smooth, slow, silent — stealthy. Sheer surprise not speed of strike sees snakes’ success.

Some Sundays, snakes succeed.

As the Beatles didn’t sing, it’s been a hard day’s week. But despite all the meatworld goings on going on, we’ve been able to get you your desired content, mostly on time until Saturday (we had to slip both the Matinee and this TW3s to Sunday, although we’ll backdate them as usual).

Some years ago, we encountered a young soldier who was anxious to tell us all about his fighting vehicle. The Stryker, he told us, enabled his unit to sneak up on the Taliban, which was not only news to us, it would have been news to the bearded enemy as well.

Lawn mower fires are common. This is another one. Google image search.

via Thomas Weigold’s Augen Geradeaus blog, here’s H&K’s response to this week’s commission reports. There were several reports; H&K chose, not surprisingly, to focus on the news that any deficiency in the G36 has not caused German casualties, and that troops are still fond of the embattled rifle.

There’s stupid, and then there’s this. Putting out fires with a van full of inflammable material, like gas, ammo, and the van’s own tires. (Yes, tires burn. Didn’t everybody watch Black Hawk Down?)

Hey, a boat full of 3,000 British football hooligans. Unlimited alcohol. Balconies and railings cunningly deployed to tempt the foolhardy. The cold, cold English Channel in autumn.

The Molotov Cocktail, so named in the 1930s as an insult to the then-foreign minister of the USSR, who was doing all he could to put the concept of World Revolution into action, is a deceptively simple weapon.

Reasonable question, after this morning’s cock-up. The Walther post was supposed to go live this AM and by midnight it just wasn’t ready, so we punted to this morning, finished it… and put it up as of 0600.

About 1100 we noticed it wasn’t there. When we went to launch the 1100 post. We put it up as of 0600 all right but not 0600 today… so we went back and exhumed it, and reinterred it in the appropriate grave site.

So today’s posts will be slightly delayed (by about one slot) and the Friday Tour d’Horizon may be canc’d.

We also took the time to dig through the spam queue and liberated three or four real comments from among several hundred spams. (We receive 4 point something spams for every real human comment, and our automated tools catch almost all the former and very few, thank Heaven, of the latter. And we’ve received over 25k real comments since starting the blog, so you do the math!) If you are Y., or Desertrat, or a couple of other regulars and wonder what happened to some comment(s) or other of yours, it has been sprung from comment purgatory and now basks in Elysium. Well, it’s in the post to which you posted it, finally.

For most collectors, especially Americans, the concept of “Walther” begins with the innovative double-action PP (Polizei Pistole) of 1929, and then leads on through the PPK, the Olympia-Pistole of 1936, the Heeres Pistole that became the P.38, and the Walther semi-auto G41 and G43 to the modern Walther service and target firearms (and air guns, a post-WWII development). In fact, the company itself had been producing fine firearms for over 40 years before that PP revolutionized pocket pistols forever, and it had forebears that went back still further into German history.

The idea of delivering troops by parachute first took hold in World War I, although it wouldn’t be done at the time. But between the wars, something new arose as a possibility: glider delivery.