The Original Old Farts Club
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Unca Walt
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Well, shitdamnhellpissfartpoop. A cop stopped by my house just now.
He says nobody was able to get gunpowder for my cannon. The store is out. (Cops have been augmenting my cannon powder supply every year for a dozen years -- they get a kick outa lighting the fuse and running.) I had tried a coupla times to get some at the local boomery. No joy.
I found a powder horn with some in it. Enough for one shot. Mebbe two. Times are tough.
Hey! I just found an old magazine article I wrote about how I got banned from a shooting range.
Lemme see if I can copy it...
He says nobody was able to get gunpowder for my cannon. The store is out. (Cops have been augmenting my cannon powder supply every year for a dozen years -- they get a kick outa lighting the fuse and running.) I had tried a coupla times to get some at the local boomery. No joy.
I found a powder horn with some in it. Enough for one shot. Mebbe two. Times are tough.
Hey! I just found an old magazine article I wrote about how I got banned from a shooting range.
Lemme see if I can copy it...
Quick Walt, hide the weed…was you hitting the rehit bag when you saw that cop? Happy Independence Day to you And yours of course…
Unca Walt
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I’m Gettin’ Better All The Time
© Walt C. Snedeker
|
"Why don’t you take your new finger-trap and go out somewhere and shoot it?” This pregnant sentence was delivered by The Fabled PC in one of those unnaturally strained voices that women occasionally become prone to for no particular reason.
The sarcasm inside the unexplainable strained pitch was unmistakable. My dainty darling was cleaning up the tiles in the kitchen from where I had accidentally spilled the contents off the tray containing the little cocktail onions, blueberry jam, and the Sam’s Club quart of maraschino cherries. All the jars had smashed with explosive reports, depositing gooey, sticky, and stinky objects around a fairly large area. A little of each had even gotten on the rug in the dining room. But it was no big thing, at least when you compare it to the time I… but that is another story.
I had decided to be husbandly helpful and assist her in cleaning the refrigerator. It was one of those tasks that beautiful women assign to themselves for no discernable reason from time to time. How she could suddenly decide that a refrigerator was to be pronounced dirty is beyond me. Only good things are placed in there… unless you count the bag of fish guts I had left in there so they wouldn’t ripen too much until the following day (garbage day). Of course, the bag of fish guts leaked a little, but not so badly that anyone would think of cleaning the whole refrigerator. And I had forgotten them when I pushed them back by shoving in the half gallon of ice cream (OK, so I forgot – ice cream traditionally goes in the freezer).
The Fabled PC had come into the kitchen and noticed the refrigerator drooling a little. We later found out that when I had painted that chipped spot on the wall behind it that I had unplugged the ‘fridge and forgotten to re-plug it in while I waited for the paint to dry. Well, it’s easy to forget something like that when you are busy cleaning up a whole gallon of spilled paint off the kitchen floor…
Anyway, the sarcastic reference to my “new finger trap” was regarding a slightly embarrassing episode with my brand-new .58 calibre Thompson/Center Big Boar black powder rifle. I had been going into raptures over the beautiful beast there in my living room. It had just arrived. The hole in the barrel was huge.
Of course, my rather thick, klutzy fingers couldn’t fit into the barrel, but I was sure one of the slender digits of my dainty bride’s delicate hands could. So I inveigled, insisted, and cajoled that she try.
Finally, she did. And sure enough, her finger slid down the barrel all the way past her knuckle. Wow! What a big gun! Wow!
But then, she couldn’t get her finger out. We tried oil (that wouldn’t hurt the gun), and butter (iffy, but I was willing to sacrifice), and many, many tugs. No joy. The Fabled PC was beginning to talk about hacksaws and the like. Defensively, I pointed out that I would have to cut the barrel three times, once to get the piece with her finger in it free, then once lengthwise on each side of the entrapment part. This could be dangerous to her finger.
I suggested that we go to bed and sleep on the problem, and maybe we would come up with an answer, but she was getting somewhat testy and unreasonable.
Then, I came up with what turned out to be the answer. I drove us both to that big sporting goods store up there on Rt. 441 by Palmetto. She said she felt very awkward walking through the store attached to a giant black powder rifle, but I said it was necessary, because I had to get the right gadget for the gun. Besides, I helped carry the gun.
The gadget was a high-pressure, CO2 one-shot gizmo that you screw into the place where the hammer falls. Sixteen dollars! Geez…
But, anything for my true darling. I paid for it, and with the crowd standing around taking pictures, squeezed the gizmo’s trigger.
POOOOF!
Her finger popped right out.
After we stopped at the Emergency Room at the Coral Springs Medical Center for a splint, we went home. That is when the Fabled PC noticed the refrigerator drooling.
Sensing that she was for some reason feeling a little short with me for the moment, I decided to meekly follow her advice (read: “royal command”) and go out to the shooting range and fire my new giant boorango.
And here, Gentle Reader follows total Gospel truth, unbelievable as it may sound:
They put me in one of those little shooting stalls, and I began to stoke up my cannon. Everybody else was shooting “normal” little stuff like .44 Magnums and the like. When I finally got ready and my kabola went off, there was sudden total silence in the range.
Several veterans slowly got up from the floor, except the one guy that kept on screaming something about “INCOMING!!”.
Folks came wandering on down to my little stall to see what the heck made such a noise. That was when the real trouble started.
It went thisaway: The shooting range floor was constructed of twenty-by-twenty foot slabs of smooth concrete. Between slabs like that, there are expansion joints. They are about a quarter of an inch wide. For fifteen years, folks had been shooting at the range, and each night, someone would go out and sweep up all the brass and dust.
Well, the payoff was that the “dust” contained a lot of unburned gunpowder, for it is a fact, Gentle Reader, that when one fires a pistol, about 5-10% of the powder flies out unburned.
So, after fifteen years of shooting and sweeping, the expansion cracks had about four inches of unburned gunpowder in them.
Yup. While the erstwhile shooters were admiring my giant rifle (one guy tried to stick his finger in the barrel, but I dissuaded him), the expansion crack in the concrete floor near my little stall gave out a sudden:
SPUTZ!
This was accompanied by a billowing cloud of whitish smoke.
Then it started in earnest: SPUTZ! FOOOSH!! SPITSPUTZ!!!
FOOOOOOOOOSSHHHHH!
Huge monstrously expanding clouds of impenetrable white smoke flew to the ceiling and spread across it. Meanwhile, the powder trail made by the expansion crack moved the fooshing and sputzing further down. All the way to the place where four slabs came together about twenty feet away. Then, the display branched three new ways. By now, the entire shooting range was so milky white that we could just make each other out in the fog.
The guy in the corner kept calling us newbies, and that we should “hit the deck!” while we still had a chance. A couple of the shooters accepted his veteran advice.
The rest of us ran for it, choking pretty badly. We got out of the shooting area, and back into the store proper. The owner looked at me and said, “Walt, you are the only person in the world that could set fire to a smooth concrete floor!”
And a couple of other things.
Well, I couldn’t go home, and the owner of the range was unmoved by my lucid explanation about how this couldn’t possibly happen again for another fifteen years or so; he wanted me outa there.
So I went to the movies and saw “Volcano”. The special effects were pitiful next to what I know I can accomplish with by lovely new blackpowder rifle.
https://www.grafs.com/retail/catalog/category/categoryId/3501Ship to your door with a hazmat fee so order a lot.
That is a big chunk of lead.
It is sexy as all get out aint it!?!
Oh yes, it is. I am chunking 250 gr. down range, out of my 450 Bushmaster, and that ain’t nothing to sneeze at.
More than double that is, just wow.
Black powder throws lead like nobodies bidness.
Now they have the full metal jacketted rounds with a sabot.
Shoot very accurately but kind of weird to me personally in a muzzleloader.
Now they have the full metal jacketted rounds with a sabot.
Shoot very accurately but kind of weird to me personally in a muzzleloader.
BubbaGrumpsNutz
Member
Pee, Pew....
Yeah, I never jumped on the in-line bandwagon.
Mine is a side lock, and I shoot patch and ball.
Unca Walt
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12 to the pound
Unca Walt
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They may as well leave me the delivery truck too. I would have paid for it.
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New without the box seems to be priced fairly at 500 bucks…plus whatever shipping costs will be… i’ll even toss in a box of lead and a tube of boar butter…
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Unca Walt
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I stumbled on a Starkey Story that I sent to Big and Boo a while back. And an Addendum to the story, too.
Since I am getting old (I think) -- I will share:
My first and only trip to Tijuana was the better part of a century ago. I was the quintessential dichotomy of soldier and innocent kid.
How it came about is lost in time's misty hoohah. But I wound up with Starkey and a coupla other guys. (I have a dozen Starkey Stories) We drove over the border in my 1956 Ford Victoria 2-Door beauty over a dinky little bridge and into Mexico.
Tijuana. It ain't today like it was then. Cantinas and... yuck! Perfect for young GI's!
We went into a pulqueria. Pulqueria sounds like a disease, doesn't it? Why not? Pulque is made by a bunch of really ugly fat ole Messican things of the female persuasion chewing on cactus (sans spines) until they get a good, gooey mouthful... and then they spit it into a communal pot.
Lotsa spit, lotsa pots. They let it rot (“ferment” is a synonym). And they pour it into any containers they know the volume of.
Do you remember Cott's soda? Well, at our luxurious destination, there was a Cott's soda bottle up on the shelf behind the bartender. I use that word, bartender, because I do not have a substitute for reality: the “bar” was an old door supported by mismatched sawhorses on a dirt floor.
Anyway, any kind of an anchor to home is welcome in this kind of place, so I signaled for that bottle. I got handed a tin teacup. I was ready. I was tough. I was the meanest sumbitch in the valley.
I poured it and made a mistake. I smelled it.
It smelled exactly like vomit.
But I wasn't gonna give up my valley... so I gulped it down. After only a little gagging, it wasn't that bad. I was surprised. I got a few badass points from the other three out of it.
We were in there about a half-hour (the other two had gone cantina-hopping, leaving Starkey and me). I think I had about a half-gallon of rotted spit in me when Starkey informed me he had to drain the dragon. You could tell where the crapper was quite easily. He headed off, and I ordered another pulque.
A guy moves in next to me in the spot Starkey had. He orders a pulque and some other thing I did not understand.
Oddest responses came to me:
Here I was, in a place where they'll stab you to death just betting to see which way you are gonna fall. Moreover, the guy next to me looked like he was going to laugh and shout, “We doan need no steenking badges!”
About all he lacked was twin bandeleros.
But it all kind of excited me – and in a happy way. The guy seemed quite friendly.
When his weird order arrived with his pulque, it was tostadas and a flattish sort of bowl with white gooey stuff in it.
That moved.
Pancho picked up a tostada, looked at me archly, and scooped up some of the wiggly goo... and ate it.
Ain't no way I could even think of hesitating... except... when I scooped up some of the goo with my tostada, a small white worm with two black eyes was looking at me.
I faked a good smile and gobbled with gusto. Another surprise. It was pretty damn' good! We shared the plate and ordered another.
By now, I was beginning to get a tad concerned about Starkey. Just about when I was going to go back there, Starkey came out.
He was grug up to his elbows.
It gives the reader a further sense of the upscale gentility of this cantina when I tell you that Starkey just leaned up on the bar and ordered some pulque... and nobody said a word or even spared a glance at the fecal material all over his arms.
Except me. I grabbed him way up by the shoulder and shout-whispered-hissed, “What the hell happened to you?”
He sighed, reached in and pulled out his wallet (equally yuckky). “I got done taking a dump in the outhouse and my wallet fell down in. I hadda go get it.”
An aside here for those not in the military in the Olden Days; A GI simply did NOT lose his ID in a foreign country.
Just about this time, I was out of money. My last bottle of pulque had shamed me. There is something equivalent to “lees” in a beer brew. You do not drink the lees.
I drank the lees. About the consistency of ketchup. It was a poor decision.
By the grace of Gawd and a prior agreement, all four of us were in my Victoria heading toward the US border. We were pretty fermented. I couldn't walk, much less drive, so it fell on Starkey to get us back.
As we approached the check station, I was hollering out the passenger window something about zombies.
They just waved us through. We went through border inspection at 50MPH.
About five miles down the road, I suddenly realized I was about to call for dinosaurs. Starkey locked up the brakes and I boiled out just in time to projectile vomit far more than a quart of something horrible.
To this day, I think I remember it was green... and some of it crawled away.
Since I am getting old (I think) -- I will share:
Tijuana In The Olden Days
© Walt C. Snedeker
© Walt C. Snedeker
My first and only trip to Tijuana was the better part of a century ago. I was the quintessential dichotomy of soldier and innocent kid.
How it came about is lost in time's misty hoohah. But I wound up with Starkey and a coupla other guys. (I have a dozen Starkey Stories) We drove over the border in my 1956 Ford Victoria 2-Door beauty over a dinky little bridge and into Mexico.
Tijuana. It ain't today like it was then. Cantinas and... yuck! Perfect for young GI's!
We went into a pulqueria. Pulqueria sounds like a disease, doesn't it? Why not? Pulque is made by a bunch of really ugly fat ole Messican things of the female persuasion chewing on cactus (sans spines) until they get a good, gooey mouthful... and then they spit it into a communal pot.
Lotsa spit, lotsa pots. They let it rot (“ferment” is a synonym). And they pour it into any containers they know the volume of.
Do you remember Cott's soda? Well, at our luxurious destination, there was a Cott's soda bottle up on the shelf behind the bartender. I use that word, bartender, because I do not have a substitute for reality: the “bar” was an old door supported by mismatched sawhorses on a dirt floor.
Anyway, any kind of an anchor to home is welcome in this kind of place, so I signaled for that bottle. I got handed a tin teacup. I was ready. I was tough. I was the meanest sumbitch in the valley.
I poured it and made a mistake. I smelled it.
It smelled exactly like vomit.
But I wasn't gonna give up my valley... so I gulped it down. After only a little gagging, it wasn't that bad. I was surprised. I got a few badass points from the other three out of it.
We were in there about a half-hour (the other two had gone cantina-hopping, leaving Starkey and me). I think I had about a half-gallon of rotted spit in me when Starkey informed me he had to drain the dragon. You could tell where the crapper was quite easily. He headed off, and I ordered another pulque.
A guy moves in next to me in the spot Starkey had. He orders a pulque and some other thing I did not understand.
Oddest responses came to me:
Here I was, in a place where they'll stab you to death just betting to see which way you are gonna fall. Moreover, the guy next to me looked like he was going to laugh and shout, “We doan need no steenking badges!”
About all he lacked was twin bandeleros.
But it all kind of excited me – and in a happy way. The guy seemed quite friendly.
When his weird order arrived with his pulque, it was tostadas and a flattish sort of bowl with white gooey stuff in it.
That moved.
Pancho picked up a tostada, looked at me archly, and scooped up some of the wiggly goo... and ate it.
Ain't no way I could even think of hesitating... except... when I scooped up some of the goo with my tostada, a small white worm with two black eyes was looking at me.
I faked a good smile and gobbled with gusto. Another surprise. It was pretty damn' good! We shared the plate and ordered another.
By now, I was beginning to get a tad concerned about Starkey. Just about when I was going to go back there, Starkey came out.
He was grug up to his elbows.
It gives the reader a further sense of the upscale gentility of this cantina when I tell you that Starkey just leaned up on the bar and ordered some pulque... and nobody said a word or even spared a glance at the fecal material all over his arms.
Except me. I grabbed him way up by the shoulder and shout-whispered-hissed, “What the hell happened to you?”
He sighed, reached in and pulled out his wallet (equally yuckky). “I got done taking a dump in the outhouse and my wallet fell down in. I hadda go get it.”
An aside here for those not in the military in the Olden Days; A GI simply did NOT lose his ID in a foreign country.
Just about this time, I was out of money. My last bottle of pulque had shamed me. There is something equivalent to “lees” in a beer brew. You do not drink the lees.
I drank the lees. About the consistency of ketchup. It was a poor decision.
By the grace of Gawd and a prior agreement, all four of us were in my Victoria heading toward the US border. We were pretty fermented. I couldn't walk, much less drive, so it fell on Starkey to get us back.
As we approached the check station, I was hollering out the passenger window something about zombies.
They just waved us through. We went through border inspection at 50MPH.
About five miles down the road, I suddenly realized I was about to call for dinosaurs. Starkey locked up the brakes and I boiled out just in time to projectile vomit far more than a quart of something horrible.
To this day, I think I remember it was green... and some of it crawled away.
Unca Walt
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The Addendum:
Starkey came back out of the stank, and as we were slopping up the pulque, a young girl about 20 or so came in with a tray supported by a strap over her shoulders just like one of those cigarette girls in the old movies.
Instead of cigarettes, cigars and matches, she had porn pics (in B&W) of herself doing stuff... But it was not what was in her tray that held Starkey and Himself agape. It was the fact that the only thing she was wearing beside the tray was really dirty panties.
The ass of her panties was covered in clotted mud, like she'd sat down in a gooey spot and didn't care. And her chest was very evenly dirty, except where some guy had been mouthing her nips (she was definitely not a mother).
She smiled seductively at Starkey – to my great relief – who immediately found his tin cup of pulque to be fascinating.
That is the only time I ever saw Starkey back down in horror from anything. And I mean anything.
I got no more than a glance from her, which was par for the course if you were with Starkey... a blond nordic god only slightly more imposing than the statue of David – and built a lot better.
I have seen him pick out a woman in a crowd and say,
“I'm gonna take that one, Shake. Catch you later.”
Ten minutes later, the pair would leave – with the femme holding his arm like she had found salvation.
Not this time. And no, I did not even think of buying a donkey/girl pic. Yuk.
Special Addendum Never Published -- Just For Big
Starkey came back out of the stank, and as we were slopping up the pulque, a young girl about 20 or so came in with a tray supported by a strap over her shoulders just like one of those cigarette girls in the old movies.
Instead of cigarettes, cigars and matches, she had porn pics (in B&W) of herself doing stuff... But it was not what was in her tray that held Starkey and Himself agape. It was the fact that the only thing she was wearing beside the tray was really dirty panties.
The ass of her panties was covered in clotted mud, like she'd sat down in a gooey spot and didn't care. And her chest was very evenly dirty, except where some guy had been mouthing her nips (she was definitely not a mother).
She smiled seductively at Starkey – to my great relief – who immediately found his tin cup of pulque to be fascinating.
That is the only time I ever saw Starkey back down in horror from anything. And I mean anything.
I got no more than a glance from her, which was par for the course if you were with Starkey... a blond nordic god only slightly more imposing than the statue of David – and built a lot better.
I have seen him pick out a woman in a crowd and say,
“I'm gonna take that one, Shake. Catch you later.”
Ten minutes later, the pair would leave – with the femme holding his arm like she had found salvation.
Not this time. And no, I did not even think of buying a donkey/girl pic. Yuk.
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