Totally. Unacceptable.

hat tip to pdb

Okay, so she caught some hot brass down the shirt and shot herself in the leg. We’ve all been there.

What we really need to know: were any breasts harmed in the making of this story?

A philistine videogame salesman loyal reader recently inquired about my intense interest in the (hopefully) soon-to-be-released Ruger No. 1 rifle in 450/400 Nitro Express. I’ll try to explain.

Much of my boyhood was spent devouring the writings of Ross Seyfried, which left me permanently fascinated by British sporting rifles. When I had the chance to meet Ross a few years ago, he joked that he had “warped me for life,” and he was right. The work of the old British gunmakers just leaves me slack-jawed. They had an understanding of form, line, and proportion that almost doesn’t exist anymore. As far as I’m concerned, they reached perfection and built the most elegant and beautiful guns ever made.

Unfortunately, those superlatives translate into “cubic dollar” price tags. The low end of the market is in the “decent used car” range, while really spectacular pieces get into “nice house in a good neighborhood” territory. The base price of a new Holland & Holland Royal double rifle is a hair under $150,000 at current exchange rates. If you’re a little short on cash this month, you can pick up a basic bolt-action rifle from H&H for only $36,000. I’m not making this up; you can see for yourself right here.

So, as in most areas of life, an ordinary slob like me has to settle for what he can actually get. And the closest thing I can get is a Ruger No. 1, which pretty strongly resembles the kind of single shot rifles the Brits were building a hundred years ago. Compare a genuine Farquharson single (like this one made by Jeffery or this Mahillion) to the Ruger, and the resemblance is clear. Ruger also borrowed some styling cues from the Scottish gunmaker Alexander Henry; take a look at that forend.

But Ruger’s been making No. 1s for forty years now; what has me really excited is the chambering. For the first time in those forty years, the No. 1 is being offered in a “proper” British caliber. True, they’ve been available in .375 H&H and .416 Rigby for a long time, and those are both grand old English cartridges. But those rounds are belted and rimless, respectively, and original Brit singles were almost always chambered for rimmed calibers. With the 450/400, we’ll finally be able to get a reasonably authentic-looking single in an authentic caliber, with ammunition that’s mass-produced by a major American manufacturer to boot.

The 450/400 should also appeal to more shooters than something like the .470 Nitro Express, which kills at the muzzle and maims at the butt. By comparison, the 450/400 is the “light heavyweight” of the Nitro Express family; it has plenty of power but is a definite step below the bigger guns and should be significantly friendlier to the shooter. I estimate the recoil as 37 foot-pounds at 16.7 feet/second, which is pretty close to the .375 H&H. You wouldn’t want to shoot a hundred rounds from a benchrest, but it’s not likely to kick you out from under your earmuffs, either. It’s perfectly suited to elk or big bears, and I wouldn’t hesitate to go after whitetails with one. But then again, I’m warped for life.

Next time I decide to do some shooting, DO NOT use a vise, hammer and screw.

Woke up at 1:30 in the afternoon, surrounded by Bar Smell so thick it forms a palpable haze around me. Thank #DIETY for old friends.

In other news, I’ve had it with gun companies cutting corners. The CZ-75 SA looked GREAT, until I did a little more research and discovered that it comes with a plastic trigger. Said trigger has been known to break. Good job, CZ. You saved $1 by using the plastic part, and lost out on the chance to sell me a gun.

Still firmly at the top of my must-buy list: the Ruger No. 1 in 450/400 Nitro Express.

Let’s be clear about this. I have absolutely no NEED for it. But damn, I WANT it.

… in the drunk tank.

Light blogging over the next few days, probably.

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas: Brit babe Keeley Hazell.

You can lay the blame for my blog on pdb; he inspired me to start and now refers to me, slightly creepily, as his “blog spawn.” I figured, quite reasonably, that if he can do it…

I first set up shop on Blogger, which is owned by Google. It worked well enough, but it wasn’t quite as flexible as I would have liked. After incessant pestering, I took the plunge and “upgraded” to the Blogger beta, which gained me absolutely nothing and forced me to be signed in to a Google account to post or comment. This pissed me off, especially since I had a different Google account that I used for email. I could be in my Gmail account, or on Blogger, but not both at the same time. Suffice it to say I was not in love with Blogger.

Also, around the same time that I started blogging, I went through a very lengthy interview process with Google. After almost two months, they declined to make me an offer. I did not take this personally; I’d done my homework and knew that what I’d experienced was par for the course. They tend to put folks through a gauntlet of tests and a huge number of interviews, then drop them without a word of explanation. Like I said, I knew that would probably happen to me, and I was right. The whole process gave me a little peek inside the company, though, and… Well, the place struck me as being vaguely cultish and more than a little creepy. I’m not at all sure that I would have taken the job if it had been offered.

Between that experience and the AOL search data scandal, I got a little wary of having so much of my online life and personal information in the hands of Google. Between that unease and my growing dissatisfaction with the Blogger service, plus my ownership of a perfectly good domain name, plotting my next move didn’t require a Ph.D. in rocket surgery. I signed up for web hosting.

So far (and I’m less than a week into this), everything has been great. Migrating the blog from Blogger to my own Wordpress installation took a bit of research and savvy, but the end result made it worthwhile. I now have complete control over my layout, I got rid of that stupid navigation bar, and the page looks (at least in my eyes) better than ever. While it’s pure vanity, I also get a little kick out of having my own domain and a bunch of @unforgivingminute.com email addresses. Check out that slick entry page, too. Yeah, I know: Get over yourself, kid.

I won’t go through all the nitty-gritty details of getting a domain, securing a host, and setting up a site. There’s plenty of tutorials already out there. If you’re interested in the details of my own experience or are thinking about taking the plunge yourself, by all means leave a comment or shoot me an email and I’ll be glad to help you out. For me, the whole thing was pretty simple and straightfoward. I’m a reasonably savvy amateur geek, not a professional IT nerd, and I was able to do what needed doing without breaking anything or begging for help from more knowledgeable folks.

Updates will follow as the situation warrants…

Once again the gun-snob side of me must come forward to beat the ever-living shit out of some marketeers, for apparently the kind but slightly dim folks in Morgan, Utah plan to sell these:

Yes, that is a Browning Hi-Power, the most elegant and perfectly proportioned handgun ever made. And yes, it really is painted to look like a tree. I have two objections to this.

First, from a purely aesthetic, gun-snob point of view, there are some things you JUST. DO. NOT. DO. This is a prime example; the Hi-Power deserves to wear deep, highly polished bluing or a nicely executed hard chrome finish. It does NOT deserve the Krylon touch. You people are pissing on the graves of John Moses Browning and Dieudonne Saive. Stop it.

Second, who do you expect will buy these monstrosities? Much though it pains me to acknowledge this, there really is a segment of the market that thinks a sidearm done up to look like the wood pile behind the shed is a really nifty idea. That segment of the market is very different from the segment that buys Hi-Powers. The Hi-Power is practically a cult item among knowledgeable gunfolk, and it has particular appeal to traditionalists and gun-snobs. The people who want Hi-Powers will hate this finish, and the people who want this finish will want it on a different gun. I’m sure it’d sell like hotcakes if you put it on a Glock.

Being an eternal optimist, though, I can see the silver lining on this Mossy Oak cloud. With a bit of luck, Browning will move about three of these guns before selling the rest of the production run to CDNN for 50 cents on the dollar. Then we’ll be able to buy them up at fire-sale prices and ship them off to Virgil Tripp so a proper finish can be applied.