Modern Art, Some Kind of Joke?

Aluminium Road

It's not all about guns and horses in LSPland. There's church, obviously, and trucks. But let's not forget Art and a sister that drove me away from the sensible task of weapons cleaning to visit something called the Nasher, which is a kind of modern art museum in Dallas.

sister playing about in the art

Off we went and there was modern art in all its glory. I especially liked "Aluminium Road" which evidently "captured the essence and quality of road" in a series of cast aluminium ingots placed stairwise, as though ascending to something that wasn't defined. Who knows, we ask, where the "stair" will take us as life's road climbs higher into the ineffable Other.

Such rubbish..

So here's a picture of some Selous Scouts to set things right.

Selous

Dove hunting later followed by birds on the grill and some rabbit.

God bless,

LSP

Snap Back to Reality

Some people, from England, feel that I've lived in Texas for too long and have lost touch with reality.

some kind of hat

That's absurd. You can't live too long in Texas.

put the guns in the truck, LSP

It has trucks.

defend that laptop!

It has guns.

just taking it easy in the arena

It has horses.

Sounds pretty real to me.

In nanny state England you can't even own a pistol.

Just sayin',

LSP

From Here To Qeternity

descent of the damned

Acting in solidarity with those unfortunate enough to have money deposited in Spanish banks, I decided   to cash out my spare change box, while the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters it held still had some kind of value.

LSP savings and loans

I'd use that money, I figured, to buy some epoxy and blue tape to bed the barreled receiver of my Lee Enfield Mk. III sporter. But quickly! Before tape and steel putty cost a bergan full of worthless magicke currencie.

With a sense of fiscal cliff urgency I drove to the local supermarket, box of change in hand, and loaded it into Coinstar, which turns your metal money into a redeemable IOU, for a fee.

how much does it cost?

I didn't care about the fee. I just wanted the money, fast, while it could still buy something. So I emptied the box into the machine. Clang, clunk, went the cash. $53.65 went the Coinstar, on its screen, and then it stopped working. "Sorry, I've seen your money, but I can't give it to you," stated the mechanical thief.

"Customer Service" was no use because the talent was busy talking to a policewoman about a picture on his CCTV (close circuit television) and I began to panic. Would I ever get my money? Will I get arrested for asking? I got the cash and avoided prison, in the end, and by some miracle Coinstar Currency still had fractional buying power.

oh. dear.

But don't worry. If we print enough money then everyone will become rich!

Just like in Rhodesia Zimbabwe.

LSP

I Love dove Hunting

first birds in

Sunday evening seems to be turning into Dove Hunt Evening, which is just fine by me. It was raining this time and I wondered if the birds would be flying but didn't much care because getting out in the field with guns is fine as it is. Still, I wanted to shoot some of the avian acrobats.

two gun shoot

With that in mind, there seems to be a general consensus that dove don't much like a cold front and fly before it, the trick being to catch them them as they do. Not much chance of that, I thought, because Texas had changed to "Wales in summer" weather conditions, with rain and drizzle for the best part of a week. 

find the bird, yo.

But I needn't have worried; as soon as we parked the vehicles and loaded the guns, birds started flying like fury out of the trees where they'd been taking cover from the rain. GWB made short work of three with his old-school Browning 20 gauge. I let off a veritable flak barrage with a Mossberg 12 pump... and missed! Useless. I'd forgotten to concentrate in the right out of the gate excitement of the thing.

all hail the new truck!

So that was good and goes to show that just because it's raining you can't get out and hunt dove; we settled down on a treeline and got several more as the evening progressed and I'd like to think I redeemed myself with a decent, aimed this time, long shot or two.

Dove's in the freezer now, waiting for next Sunday and the grill and more birds... hopefully.

 I love dove hunting,

LSP

Murdering Muslim Mob

Rather than comment on the honest truly horrendous portrayal of Mohammed as a violent pedophile who beheaded Jews, which you can watch here before Youtube pulls it, I'll leave you with some pictures of Italy.

Italy

Not the European one! No, this is the It'ly that you'll find nestling by the side of I35 on the way to Waco from Dallas.

It has a McDonalds, where I stopped for two cheeseburgers, and a drive-in liquor store. For some reason gas in It'ly is 13 cents more expensive a gallon than it is in Hillsboro. But don't be fooled, Italian gas is no better than the fuel to be had further South.

Guns

I was happy I was armed.

Hadith

As you leave Italy you can look back over your shoulder and see the it recede in the rear window of your pickup.

Now, I'm not some sort of useless "all religions are the same" comsymp pacifist, but I pray there's not another war in the Middle East.

Looks to me like that might be hard to avoid.

LSP

Europe and the Faith

Belloc

Every year or so I read Europe and the Faith, written in 1920 by Hilaire Belloc. In it, Belloc sketches the history of the late Western Roman Empire, explaining its evolution under the aegis of the Church, into what, for him, was the high watermark of European civilization, the Middle Ages of the 13th Century. He then describes the Reformation and its aftermath, the dislocated culture of the past four centuries, in which the human soul and her endeavor has become increasingly alienated, fragmented and miserable. 

As an aside, the author believes that the Reformation only succeeded through the defection of a civilized Roman Province, England, to the various forces in mutiny against the Church and her culture. An interesting theory and one which, I think, originates with Belloc alone.

Whether you agree with him or not, Belloc's unconventional, clear-sighted and always sharp reading of history is certainly provocative, sometimes aggressively so, and, for me at least, always entertaining. I find his conclusion prescient:

So things have gone. We have reached at last, as the final result of that catastrophe three hundred years ago, a state of society which cannot endure and a dissolution of standards, a melting of the spiritual framework, such that the body politic fails. Men everywhere feel that an attempt to continue down this endless and ever darkening road is like the piling up of debt. We go further and further from a settlement. Our various forms of knowledge diverge more and more. Authority, the very principle of life, loses its meaning, and this awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited, and which is still our trust, trembles and threatens to crash down. It is clearly insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who still live may see the ruin. But ruin when it comes is not only a sudden, it is also a final, thing.

In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church.

Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.

The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.

Orthodox catholics will love this book, others perhaps less so. I count myself amongst the former, albeit from an Anglican perspective.

Stockpile ammo, go to Mass.

LSP

9/11

Rest in Peace.

LSP

Worker's Paradise

My philisophically inclined Ivy League friend and sportsman, GWB, sent in this self-portrait with the legend:

let's hunt some dove, LSP!

"Objects in the mirror are even further to the right than they appear."

Quite.

LSP

Eat Dove

peppers

After a decent Sunday shoot with my philisophical friend GWB, it was time to put the dove on the grill. First you remove the small breasts from the bone and soak them in brine.

note the Benchmade

Next you chop some Jalapeno peppers in half, scoop out the insides and fill them with cream cheese. Place the dove meat on the peppers and wrap them in bacon; skewer with a toothpick and place the poppers on the grill for 20 minutes of indirect heat.

bacon makes everything good

Tasty as you like.

result

It's good to eat what you shoot, provided it's edible.

Cheers,

LSP

Shoot Dove

I like September because you can get out in the field to shoot dove, which is what I did on Sunday evening with GWB.

GWB, all about Wittgenstein...

We started off by walking a tree-line or two and a large field; one dove was flushed out and went down before we set up on the edge of some tree cover and waited for the birds to fly. 

learning

They did that soon enough and after some brisk action we had a modest amount of dove for the grill. I always enjoy the excitement of the snap shot and the satisfaction of seeing the bird drop, for that matter, it's good in itself to be out at dusk in the Texan countryside. It's still, when the guns aren't firing, and gives well needed space to recollect.

get out in the field!

Thanks, GH, for letting us shoot on your land. A good time was had by all.

Shoot straight,

LSP

Sporterizing the Lee Enfield -- Part Something or Other: Metal & Wood

"Chop, chop," said the Suburban Bushwacker, "Get on with the first one." By which he meant, "get a move on, LSP, and sort out a Lee Enfield sporter." All too soon I was the proud owner of a No. 4 Mk. 1 and a No. 1 Mk. III, both sporterized at some point in their past. The Lees were multiplying like rabbits and my task was to re-sporter them as a porch project; custom rifles on a budget, as it were. Here's an update on the project with a little background.

fill that grain!

I started on the III, because it was more of a mess and I wanted the practice before tackling the No. 4, I also wanted one of the rifles to approximate to a Speed and the III's the right platform for that. After an awful lot of patient sanding, the metal was polished to 1000+ grit and the original butt stripped of gunk then refinished with Minwax Antique Oil (boiled linseed oil based -- I think). A new walnut forend arrived in July from Boyd's and was rasped down to size and sanded to 1000 grit. I was pleased to find that the inletting fitted the metal pretty well but dismayed to see so much open grain, which potentially means hours and hours of frustrating applications of sandpaper and finish. But I needn't have worried, the grain filled fairly quickly; the method I used was simple enough:

stamping like fury

Apply finish per instructions on the can, when cured apply finish to small area of the wood, sand along the grain until a slurry of finish and sawdust appears, then gently wipe the mix, I used paper towel for this, diagonally across the grain. When the wood's covered, let the stock cure for 24 hours, then sand along the grain, being careful not to go too deeply. Reapply finish and repeat the process using higher grades of grit, I started with 600 and moved up to 1000, until the grain's filled and the wood's as polished as you want.

super blue on -- what a nasty mess

So there we have it, butt, forend and barreled receiver, all polished and gleaming like a Guardsman's boot by the end of August. What next? Refinsh the metal of course, and I was going to teach myself to rust blue, which produces a great looking, durable finish, but ran out of patience and bought a bottle of Birchwood Casey Super Blue while browsing in an Academy Sports after a hospital visit in Waco.

nice

Birchwood Casey's instructions tell you to: degrease the metal, rinse with cold water and dry, then apply the bluing solution with a cotton ball or a sponge. Let dry for 30 seconds, rinse with cold water, dry, then polish lightly with fine steel wool. Repeat the process until you get the finish you want, then saturate the metal with gun oil and let it cure overnight. 

old warhorse

I did that and was pleased at the result, which wasn't that difficult to achieve but word to the wise; degrease the metal really thoroughly and don't touch it with bare skin during the process. Also, the metal darkens with every application of solution and during the time it cures. Worth bearing in mind if you want a lighter blue.

bolt back

Next step? Get a magazine, a drop-in mount for optics and possibly glass bed the Knox Form and forend tip, but first I'll see how it shoots. Iron sights, checkering, and forend cap can come when budget permits.

forestock needs a buff...

Shoot the Lee,

LSP

Putin, the New Francis?

Crane Rescue!

 Animal loving Russian Leader, Vladimir Putin, has successfully led several endangered Cranes to safety in a powered hang-glider, showing the world that he's not only Russia's preeminent "strong man" but also someone who cares deeply about the environment and God's creatures. 

However, some feel that this attraction to animals reveals Putin's disillusionment with the people he governs; like St. Francis, he would rather be with the furred, finned and feathered creatures of the wild than humans who misunderstood him.

St. Francis of Assisi

According to art gallery owner Marat Guelman, the Russian Premier "has lost faith in us. He sees our treachery, greed, cowardice and cruelty. There's nothing to love in us anymore. Dolphins, cranes, horses - that's a different thing."

Others disagree, believing that the former head of the dreaded KGB cynically uses animals for publicity purposes, unlike St. Francis, who loved them.

Obama runs from dog

President Obama runs from dogs.

Unlike Putin and St. Francis.

LSP