Lugnuts

Missing Bolt

IAman's motorcycle has been getting some hard use.

100 YEARS U.S. MILITARY HANDGUNS

100 YEARS U.S. MILITARY HANDGUNS

IAman snapped this photo at a historical gun collectors exhibition at the National Guard Armory near PDX. There's a picture of another batch of Colt revolvers in this post.

More Dirty Commies

Some crazy Chinese nationalists at the piano today insisting on their image rights.

Pretty great piece on what's wrong with the world:

The Left can’t understand why normal people are angry…

 

Commies

Oil derricks in the Baku oil field in Azerbaijan in 1912. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich

Reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars by Maurice DeKobra. It's 1927 and our man, Prince Séliman, has gone to meet with the Soviet leader in Berlin, one Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine, in an attempt to rescue Lady Diana's fortune in the form of 15,000 acres of oil fields from the Bosheviks. These two are in conversation and Varichkine lets loose with this:

"Really and truly, my friend, you are naive. Living is high since the War - but human life is cheap. When 20 million men have been the victims of inimical capitalists, what difference does it make if a few thousand Russians are incarcerated for the sake of severe principles? When hatred, violence, envy, an abject egotism have circulated at their own free will among civilized people, who has any right to reproach us for not having conducted our Revolution with a shepherd's staff in our hand and Pan's pipes to our lips? Believe me the world is always kind to successful tyrants and moral mud is only thrown at the heads of political failures. Take, for example, your dear Kerensky, the White Hope of the Western Liberals - he missed his mark, and you all reproached him bitterly for having been hypersensitive. All he would have had to do would have been to hang every one of us - Lenin and his following. With about 50 pretty little executions without trial, he might have been able to smash the egg of Communism under his heel; the constituency would then not have been overthrown by the sailor Jelesniakof, and you would have looked up to Kerensky as the greatest Statesman in the world. Revolutions are not made with mittens. A social Revolution conducted along legal lines is a toy constructed for the use of dyspeptic socialists nourished on noodles and black bread."

Add in the political infighting, treachery and murder going on in House of the Dragon and it is no wonder I am of a cynical frame of mind. 

Notes:

• Kerensky has a page in Wikipedia.
• Jelesniakof is mentioned in the book Lenin by Mark Aleksandrovich Aldanov.
• Nikolay Krestinsky was the Soviet Ambassador to Germany from 1923 to 1930.
• Prince Séliman and Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine both seem to be entirely fictitious.

The oil fields in question are near Tbilisi, Georgia:

Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea

P. S. Totally unrelated to this post, but I just came across a story about a priest murdered in Derbent which is on the above map, in Russia, on the Caspian Sea just above the border with Azerbaijan.

The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars

Edvard Grieg - Morning Mood (Au Matin)
Hawaii ASMR Nature Relaxation

I've started reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars by Maurice Dekobra. I picked up on it a year ago when I was reading The Foreign Correspontant by Alan Furst and I just now got a copy.

Early on in the book Lady Diana is performing a dance for a tubercular society fundraiser and the orchestra is playing this tune. I had never heard of it, so I thought to give it a listen and, oh, I recognize it now. If I recall correctly it often accompanies scenes of springtime in old Disney movies.

The book is a hoot. The language is extravagant, possibly even ridiculous. The characters occupy the upper reaches of society where the gossip is most vicious and possibly dangerous.

From Google Books:

One of the biggest bestsellers of all time, and one of the first and most influential spy novels of the twentieth century, is back in print for the first time since 1948

Alan Furst fans will note that train passengers in his bestselling thrillers are often observed reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars. It’s a smart detail: First published in 1927, the book was one of the twentieth century’s first massive bestsellers, selling over 15 million copies worldwide.

It’s the story of two tremendously charming characters who embark on a glamorous adventure on the Orient Express—and find themselves on a thrilling ride across Europe and into the just-barely unveiled territories of psychoanalysis and revolutionary socialism.

Gerard Seliman—technically, a Prince—is so discouraged by the demise of his marriage that he flees to London to become the personal assistant of a glamorous member of the British peerage, Lady Diana Wyndham. But he soon finds himself involved in a wild scheme by Lady Diana to save herself from looming financial ruin while simultaneously fending off rich lotharios. At the center of it all: a plan to rescue her rights to a Russian oil field now under the control of revolutionaries who don’t like capitalists.

The book that set the standard for intellectual thrillers of political and social intrigue, The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, with its jetsetting and witty protagonists, is still as fresh a page-turner as ever—and as fun.

B-25 & B-26

North American TB-25 Mitchell

This image showed up in last week's FlightAware newsletter.

B-26 Jezabelle

This one showed up in yesterday's Friday Femme Fatale Farrago (NSFW). There was no identification so I asked Google and it turned up this image of the same airplane:

Martin B-26 Marauder Jezabelle bomber crew, their mascot "Salvo" and visitors
31 August 1943

The two airplanes were very similar - medium range twin engine bombers. The B-25 had a slightly higher top speed than the B-26 (230 MPH versus 215) and a slightly longer range (1350 miles versus 1150).

Furiosa

FURIOSA : A MAD MAX SAGA | OFFICIAL TRAILER #1
Warner Bros. Pictures

The original Mad Max came out in, what? 1910? No, silly, it wasn't that long ago, it was 1979, which, now that you mention it, is kind of a long time ago. I watched the first three back when they came out and I watched the first half of #4, Fury Road, last week to get ready for Furiosa. We saw it at the OMSI Empirical theater. Tickets for the two of us were $15 total, pretty good deal for theater tickets.

How was it? Well, take Mad Max and turn it up to eleven. Wasn't Mad Max already turned up to eleven? Isn't that what made it so great? Okay, but it's been 40 odd years and someone has been letting their imagination run wild. Let's call it turned up to eleven squared.

In this fantasy wasteland we have three armed camps: Gas Town, Bullet Town and The Citadel. All three are ruled by strong men who are supported by legions of followers. There are also peasants living in caves and underground some of whom might be cannibals.

I was going to speculate on how the economy of the wasteland might work, but I'm going to leave that to somebody else.