Hi Ho, HI Ho

Off to the first 2011 loophole, a little c. 100-table production in sovereign state of Minnesota.  No big personal agenda for this one other than a bit of good-ol'-boy comradeship and junk-box snooping.

' course, I'll be strapping on the money belt. A fellow never knows when he'll run across another $850 Python.

Actually, I do need some small stuff -- pilots for the old Pacific trimmer,  a magazine release mechanism for a Winchester 69, a better magazine spring for the Marlin 38. I can hear it now, "Rotsa ruck, Jim."

Do I hope too highly that there's an issue 1911 frame, preferably Colt? Those lonesome slides and barrels are starting to get on my nerves.   Finding one would be  the neatest brazen act of loopholism I can think of.

EDIT: Nada.

G'day, Mate. Have a House on Me

The Down-Under bankers seem to be following the U.S. mortgage model. Y'all can afford any kind of McMansion you want. Trust me. After all, I'm a banker.

To achieve that modest goal of palaces for peons, they've come up with a clever new trick to (a) make would-be borrowers feel richer than they are and (b) to make their ugly (that is, unpayable) mortgages look like AAA investments.

To do so they're telling potential borrowers, "You don't really pay the rent you pay.  It's really part of your savings account, so we'll loan you more."

(The link takes you to a longish explanation of Canberra's latest whim, and, like Mythbusters, it should carry a preview line, "Caution, Economics content." But it's still worth the read for anyone interested in money as Charmin.)

Vintage and exotic gun porn in .32 ACP

Or, as the auctioneer announced it, 7 and, uhhh,  point 65 caliber, causing just enough confusion  in the country crowd that the gavel fell at $60, tickling the buyer to no end. At least it looks something like the Browning that inspired it.

It's a Model 1916 Astra patent, made by Esperanza y Unceta in Guernica, up in the Basque country, probably prior to the first great depression, the one  before this one. Nine in the magazine.  The barrel is marked "Hope," creating a certain insecurity about the confidence of the makers in its objective utility.

The apprehension was unfounded. The new owner might even have gone up to $100 on pure speculation that it was one of the good Spanish pocket pistols, and he would have won the bet.  Frittering away a remarkable sum of money running factory ammunition through the new toy, he experienced no malfunctions  and minute-of-thug  accuracy over the length of an average living room.  Or, as he remembers the session that cold afternoon,  groups of about four inches at about 25 feet from an F150 hood rest.

It hasn't been shot since, not so much because he agrees the .32  is a little light for heavy situations, but because of the reloading hassle. It tosses brass to Hell and gone, making the tinies hard to find. And he can never get used to placing the bullets over the neck with a pair of tweezers.

But it's nice enough to keep, and he'll probably pop for more practice ammo. Who knows when he'll need something small enough to slip under his cummerbund?

Workin' on the Railroad

Due to a particularly acute bout of sloth yesterday, I woke up this morning to a pile of embers in the wood burner and an empty wood box. This sent me outside to snag an arm load of  snowy billets from the pile, and that for some reason got me thinking about a recent chat with a friend -- a railroad buff --  who now works in the small city where I spent my boyhood.

Me: "When I was a little kid we could see poor Fort Dodgers carrying gunny sacks down on the tracks east of the Illinois Central depot to gather coal-car spillage. The railroad dicks left them alone."

Him: "I've heard about that. Now they'd just run down to the welfare office."


Yes, many of them would.

Then I wondered what we could say about the obvious statist objection that some people would, by superior strength or diligence or intelligence,  get more coal than others. Who would regulate the coal recovery workers in the named of fairness and equality?

The best answer I could conceive at this early hour is the coal pickers themselves, resulting in some ramshackle homes being warmer than others.

It isn't quite as cruel as it sounds. The very old and the incapacitated  always seemed  to get heating fuel. Might have been friends, churches,  Boy Scouts, Oddfellows -- all sorts of compassionate people feeling compelled to recognize the commonality of interests in helping one another, even before we sold our souls to the redistributionists.

Only those who suffered too many bouts of acute sloth were frozen out, rendering to Darwin his just due.

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You don't have to use this small personal recollection to arrive at any grand macro conclusions about the way we do things in these latter years. But if you want to, it's okay by me.