Who Said That??

My Brain Is Full Of Useless Fluff...

All kinds of random movie quotes have been circulating through my noggin lately.

Help me sort them out, if you can!!

No Googling!

UPDATE:  Answers Below!!

1) "And now for the rules of the International Chinese Downhill: there are none."
Hot Dog: The Movie

2) "Look at her. I would die for her. I would kill for her. Either way, what bliss!"
Gomez Addams - The Addams Family

3) "You'd do it for Randolph Scott!"
Sheriff Bart - Blazing Saddles

4) "Anyone who isn't dead or from another plane of existence would do well to cover their ears right about now."
Metatron - Dogma

5) "I regret trifling with married women. I'm thoroughly ashamed at cheating at cards. I deplore my occasional departures from the truth. Forgive me for taking your name in vain, my Saturday drunkenness, my Sunday sloth. Above all, forgive me for the men I've killed in anger... and those I am about to..."
Mr. Nightlinger - The Cowboys

6) "I don't like violence, Tom. I'm a businessman; blood is a big expense."
Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo - The Godfather

7) "You Americans, you're all the same. Always overdressing for the wrong occasions."
Toht The Nazi - Raiders Of The Lost Ark

8) #1 "Is it true that you went twelve-for-twelve with the Maxim Girls last year?"
    #2  "That is an excellent question. Yes and no. March and I had a scheduling conflict but fortunately the Christmas cover was twins."
GI & Tony Stark - Iron Man

9) "People on 'ludes should not drive..."
Jeff Spicoli - Fast Times At Ridgemont High

10) "Can I borrow your underpants for 10 minutes?"
Farmer Ted - 16 Candles

Cataloguing The Collection

Alas, No "Junk On The Bunk" Picture!

Well, the one picture I should have taken, I completely forgot about by the time all was said & done...

For a long time, I'd been needing to get a current listing of all the bullet-flingers in the house, write down some serial numbers and get some pictures taken.

Should the house burn down, I need something to hand the insurance company other than a pile of ashes and twisted metal.

So, on Saturday I swept through the house, gathering up everything firearm-related from all the various nooks & crannies and lined 'em all up for a chorus line.

The line of rifles stretched from one end of the pianner keyboard to the other.  That's the pic I wished I'd taken...

I have more Ruger revolvers than anything else.  Pre-WWII bolt-action rifles are a close second.  I'm woefully short of shotguns, with the 12 gauge SxS coach gun the only one at this time.

I had to guesstimate replacement value on a few of them.  Most of them were in the Blue Book, but there's insurance value, and then there's real world value.  What kind of value can you put on a custom Mauser built on a 1908 Argentine large ring action in .257 Roberts Ackley Improved?  Not a lot of those pop up on the resale market...

Anyway, it's done.  I might post a pic or two, but then again, I've told you too much already!

Friday Fricassee

A Little Bit Of Everything Stirred Up In A Sauce!

First, something gun-related!!

New shoes on the Ruger Redhawk!  When I bought the 4" Redhawk, it was supposed to come from the factory with the Hogue Bantam grips.  Instead, it was wearing the old-style wood slabs.  Perfectly OK for shooting, but not the prettiest things to look at.

Not too long afterwards, I splurged on some custom finger groove grips and some leather for it. 

With the increasingly heavy loads I run through it, I kept worry about cracking that exotic wood, and went back to the old-style walnut panels.  That was on the ragged edge of painful to shoot, however...

So, on to eBay!  Found a replacement Hogue Bantam for $25, and now it's back the way it came from the factory!

Those grips are slim, but it'll never be a concealable revolver!  The damn cylinder is as big as a beer can!



One episode left to go in the 'Downton Abbey' series.  Overall, I'd give it an unreserved thumbs-up.
The repartee between Maggie Smith and Shirley Maclaine as dueling Brit & Yankee dowagers is alone worth the price of admission!



Took delivery of a dozen bottles of liquid saccharine.  Life is looking pretty sweet!
(Why, you ask?  OK...  I prefer it to aspartame and Splenda, and MUCH prefer the liquid drops to the constant mess of paper packets.  You used to be able to buy it at Kroger and Walmart, but no more.  A 12-pack via mail order is all that's left...)

Death On The Distaff Side

Somewhat More Morbid Than The Usual Post...

I'm working my way through Series Three of Downton Abbey, the PBS/BBC drama set in WWI-era England.

It was highly recommended by my kinfolk at the last get-together, so when I saw an opportunity to pick up all three seasons for less than $30, I took a shot, and have been enjoying the show.

Mostly...

Overall, it's kind of an Upstairs/Downstairs sort of drama, peeking into the lives of the gentry as well as the working class that keep this huge estate running.  It's full of cliffhangers and breathless exclamations of undying love, and all the usual tweedy toffee-nosed drama.

My main beef is that they keep dragging the same characters through the mud without a pause for three seasons now, in some cases for no reason other than they need to keep the tension high.  You've got villains being villainous for no real purpose, and interesting subplots that just sort of wither on the vine.

And, of course, people die.

Aside from a raging dose of HMS Titanic and trench warfare, which kills off a bunch of gentry, you get a incursion of the Spanish Flu, which gives one of the characters a very moving, genteel expiration, complete with soliloquy.  Almost saintlike, if you asks me...

Of course, I kept imagining the bowels voiding noisily as the family stayed gathered around the bedside, but that's just me...

Then, a death in childbirth, and it's the polar opposite.  The paralytic seizures of eclampsia, resulting in the suffocation of the young lady.  Most distressing to watch...

At any rate, a day or so after watching this, I'm perusing Facebook and see a post that a friend of mine is "In A Relationship".  Immediately another young woman's death is front & center in my memory.

See, the person now "In A Relationship" is the former husband of the dead woman.  She died last December.  He's been on a globe-hopping trail to scatter bits of her ashes in interesting places.  On this last trip, apparently he took along a partner.

Now, I'm not one to dictate how long people wear the black, or how people deal with their grief, but I'm having a hard time with this.  I guess I'm still grieving the loss of someone who died far too young.

Anyway, I think he'd have been better off keeping the new relationship under wraps for a few more months.  Am I just being hopelessly old-fashioned??

No Sporting Purpose??

Save Towards Retirement?  How About Robbing Banks To Pay For Retirement??

This has been tempting me for a while.  It's over at the Shrine Of All Things Kerblang-y, aka Collector's Firearms.

There's no possible practical use for this Kraut vest pocket-flakwagen.   None at all.

Probably ought to go put it on layaway, huh??

 

Google Maps Strikes Again!

"What An Incredible Smell You've Discovered!!"

While nosing around up in the Texas Panhandle, I discovered one of three locations that could well provide some of the foulest odors known to man...

I was actually looking for a prison way out there in the sticks.  I've got a friend that is apparently festering in durance vile somewhere out there, and whilst doing a low-level swoop over Swisher County, I stumbled upon a trio of odd sights.

They all follow roughly the same design.  Row after row of square sections, with a huge body of water nearby.  Also, long strips of something lined up in rows.   Like this:

Curious...  Very curious...

Unless, of course, you've been inside one, and survived the olfactory assault and lived to tell the tale!

Still not sure what you're looking at?  Let's zoom in!

(Enhance...tiktiktik...  Enhance...tiktiktik)

Hmmmm...  Looks like a bunch of black & white somethings...  Zoom in some more!


(Enhance...tiktiktik...  Enhance...tiktiktik)

Congratulations!  You've discovered cows!!

Yup, one of three huge feedlots in the area, each of which generates tons of odiferous cowshit and bovine urine by the swimming pool-full.

That's probably the big runoff pond on the right.

Those dark strips are mounds of manure.  They dump 'em, bulldoze 'em and cover them in plastic and old tires to keep them from blowing in the wind.

Here's the stockpile of tires:

You've got to keep water spraying on the manure mounds, otherwise the temperature of the rotting and fermenting poo could very well rise high enough to spontaneously combust.

And you do NOT want that.  The only thing that smells worse than a feedlot?

A *burning* feedlot...

Random Thoughts On Custom Cars

Until It's Funded, It's Just Another Pipe Dream!!

More skull-sweat has been expended in the design process of a custom land-yacht.

I still can't quite shake the idea of a rolling Viking longship.  The thought of me & a dozen friends disembarking wearing horned helmets and waving axes and shields at the Interstate rest area just amuses me to no end...

Then, there's the  rolling party wagon.  Kinda like the Decoliner idea, but with an upstairs balcony and a back porch.  Nothing like kicking back on the porch with a cigar and a tall drink while you rocket down the highway at 70 mph!    I just hope someone remembered to drive, and didn't just set the cruise control.


Y'know, a PTO is such a damn useful thing on a tractor.  Did anyone ever make it a habit of installing one on a work truck?  Seems kinds handy for powering all sorts of things, including the 55 gallon drum margarita machine.  If it can be done, I'd love to have that option available.


I'm pretty much sold on the cab over engine design.  In fact, I'd like to have the cockpit mounted in front of and lower than the front wheels.

Kinda like this, only with much larger wheels:

Of course, the idea is to start with this:

Which leads me to wonder about the wisdom of having the engine behind you and the radiator out in front of you.  Hate to get pancaked by them in a wreck...

I just don't wanna have to climb a damn ladder to get into the thing...

More later...

Dangerous Obsession

Spending Money You Don't Actually Have

The urge is back with a vengeance...

Every so often, I get an compulsion to build another artcar.  The last time it surfaced was in 2009, and I was dead set on using an old school bus frame to build a rolling Viking longboat.

Sanity's eventual return and lack of ready cash usually keep me from getting past the planning stages, but this time, I may have been bitten by the bug too deeply to give up...

See, I discovered the Blastolene Decoliner...

 

Imagine a self-propelled Airstream trailer with a flying bridge!  Fantastic!!

 

You can steer it from the cockpit, or connect the steering linkage and drive it from the roof!

This thing is a work of genius.  It's built on a GMC Motorhome chassis.  Using a front-wheel drive Olds Toronado engine, you eliminate the need to get the floorboards up and over the driveline.  You keep it really low to the ground!

No rear axles!  It's got bogie wheels like a tank!!

The builder, Randy Grubb, is a serious automotive artist and engineer.  He hand-hammered the aluminum over scratch-built wooden forms, put the whole thing together and even made the hand-blown glass portholes.  If I heard correctly, the cockpit's off an old 1950 White garbage truck.


Now, I wouldn't want to try and copy the Decoliner (as if I could...) but this idea of a dual-drive fun-wagon suits me a lot better than trying to build a 14 foot tall Viking Longboat on an old Blue Bird bus frame!

Since the GMC Motorhome was the base for the EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle, my initial thought was to re-create that.  After all, you never know when you might have to invade Czechoslovakia...

Nah, been done.  Not artsy enough.

I'm thinking about an Urban Howdah.  Howdat?  Lika Dis:

Only with a lot less elephant.

This requires a lot more thought...  More later!!