Youtube comments of ZGryphon (@ZGryphon).

  1. I feel like it is bizarrely appropriate that the outcome of rampant corner-cutting was an actual corner of the building falling off. I mean, a screenwriter who pitched that idea would get thrown out of the producer's office. Also, I just realized that this was basically the literal embodiment of the second bid in the Monty Python architect sketch. "Well, as long as the tenants are of light build and relatively sedentary, I think we're onto a winner here!"
    5000
  2. It's a shame this wasn't invented by Pioneer. They'd have figured out a way to make it play Laserdiscs, too. :)
    4400
  3. My microwave is designed to thwart the one-second-left method by making a louder noise when interrupted than when it reaches the end of the cycle normally. Nice job, Panasonic!
    2600
  4. "This has been upgraded with a Sten part" is not something I would ever have expected to hear anyone say about anything.
    1700
  5. "Sir! Stop resisting!" "Scott, you're a firefighter." I feel like I shouldn't have laughed at that. But I did.
    1600
  6. "Now I know what you're thinking. 'Did he fire 40 shots, or only 39?' Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I've kinda lost track myself. But seeing as this is a .25 Guycot, the least powerful handgun in the world, and it would raise a nasty welt, you've gotta ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well? Do ya, punk?"
    1400
  7. Poindexter lived the most epic "but it's my day off" story ever.
    1200
  8. Since this rifle has basically the same inner workings as the SKS, does that mean it also shares the SKS's occasional habit of becoming an unintentional machine gun when the firing pin gets stuck forward? Boy howdy, that would be an adventure.
    1000
  9. Ah, Thomas, my old friend. I wrote my undergraduate thesis in history on Midgley, years ago. One of the things that turned up in my research was that a number of Midgley's contemporaries, including members of his family, believed his death was not accidental, but a carefully engineered suicide prompted by despair over his condition. (Not, as some have speculated since, remorse over his inventions. There's no evidence he ever saw lead as anything other than a necessary evil, and no one on Earth had the slightest idea CFCs were anything but a harmless miracle until decades after his death.) As an aside, the beneficial aspects of leaded gasoline during Midgley's lifetime weren't only economic. TEL led (as it were) to the development of high-octane fuel, particularly for aviation use, by American oil companies, which gave aircraft on the Allied side of World War II enormous performance advantages over their opponents. For example, the average octane rating of the gasoline German fighters had to settle for was about 65, as opposed to 100 or more for the RAF and U.S. Army Air Forces fighters they were up against after 1941. (By comparison, even the lowliest pump gas sold in the US today is in the mid-80s.)
    810
  10. The button to turn off the climate control is labeled "0" because Klimatisierungssystem deaktivieren wouldn't fit.
    806
  11. "It's an ingenious solution to a problem that never should've existed in the first place." - James May, talking about something else
    619
  12. "Huh, the reactor keeps scramming. Weird. Well, let's see if we can get it to start up this time," pipeline edition.
    567
  13. Out of all those who were scarred or died in this catastrophe, I feel particularly touched by Sister Mary Devine, who tried so hard to do right by her students, and Beverly Burda, who perished anyway. How can one teacher be expected to keep track of sixty-two children under normal circumstances, let alone in the chaos of an emergency? Poor Beverly's fate must have haunted Sister Devine for the rest of her life.
    533
  14. I have a couple of light switches in my house that have those little neon lamps in them. The neon's on when the switch is off, so you can find the switch in the dark. Pretty neat.
    523
  15. If my Ridgeline came home with those wheels on, I'd ground it for a month.
    496
  16. I love that this weapon is so bizarre that even Ian, whose whole purpose in this enterprise is to know and employ the technical terms for everything, can do no better to describe part of its function than "... engage that lock on top, so that you don't have all five grenades go kawoing out of the... thing." :)
    493
  17. Ah, brake cleaner, or as my father the hobbyist mechanic calls it, "cut finding spray". The subject of this video brings back fond memories from my misspent youth. I worked in an ISP network ops center where we had a lava lamp (to pass the time on the overnight shift, I guess). Once at the weekly NOC staff meeting, the manager chewed us out for misusing severity zero in the trouble ticketing system. Severity zero was for the worst problems, real future-of-the-company's-at-stake stuff, and someone used it for something that wasn't, causing the ticket system to page the manager at home in the middle of the night for what he didn't consider a good enough reason. That night about 10:30, the bulb in the ops room lava lamp burned out, so I performed the required lockout/tagout procedures for failed electrical equipment, opened a severity zero ticket for it (complete with all the troubleshooting steps and a recommended course of action, which was for senior personnel to get a purchase order and buy a new bulb at OfficeMax), then escalated it to the manager for good measure. The next afternoon when I got in, the lava lamp was fixed and the ticket was marked, "Repaired per recommendation," and closed by the manager. He never said a word to me about it. :)
    481
  18. Many years ago, the small-town newspaper I worked for assigned me to do a feature article on local WWII veterans for Veterans Day. One of the men I talked to, let's call him Harry, was part of the occupation force in Japan after the war. His job was to go around the countryside interacting with local leaders (the equivalents of town mayors and the like), trying to find caches of resources the IJA stashed for the invasion that never came so they could be distributed to the public. He had an English-Japanese phrasebook provided by the Army, but he usually worked through a translator rather than use it. One day, while talking with a mayor-type he was getting along with particularly well, Harry decided to use the phrasebook and ask him a question directly, so he looked up what the phrasebook said was a respectful way of asking directions to the restroom and painstakingly read it out phonetically. There was a pause while the mayor and translator stared at him in amazement, and then the mayor burst out laughing. (Harry told me it was the first time he'd seen a Japanese person laugh.) When he could speak again, he explained through the translator that what Harry had just asked him was phrased in the most familiar, vulgar way possible--the equivalent of "Hey buddy, where's the sh*thouse in this dump?" Sixty years later, he was convinced that whoever wrote that phrasebook for the Army did that on purpose. He never tried to use it again.
    442
  19. I have a double-action Nagant, and the 40,000-ton DA trigger pull makes Tsarist officers' concern that their men couldn't be trusted with the double-action version even more hilarious than it already would have been. It's hard work to make one of those things go off on purpose, let alone by accident. :)
    441
  20. When I was a kid in the late '70s, my parents still had one string, ancient even then, of C9s that were painted instead of made from tinted glass. They got even hotter than the tinted-glass kind. Like, lose-your-fingerprints hot. That was also back in the days when Christmas lights were wired in series, so when one bulb burned out, they all went out, making finding the dead one an incredibly tiresome process. Luckily, I had a nightlight that used the same size bulb, which my father would commandeer as a bulb tester. Ah, nostalgia. In retrospect, it's really kind of amazing how terrible those old light sets were. Between that and pre-polarization appliance plugs, it's a wonder anyone survived the 1960s.
    397
  21. It gets even better when you keep in mind that she's the only ship from the Second Pacific Squadron still in existence today.
    333
  22. "... but, at 850 rounds [per minute], it puts out a lot of cartridges." Vladof! You don't need to be a better shot; you just need to shoot more bullets.
    306
  23. I love how they had a perfectly good captive pin system in place, and then for the second diassembly pin, they decided nah, we're just going to HK this one.
    292
  24. To me, the best part of this is the example of trying to operate a regular bolt-action rifle. It's such a dead-on parody of the utter, unrealistic incompetence of the people in the corresponding bits of real informercials. "Are you tired of fumbling for your flashlight in the dark? Oh no!" says the narrator, as a person who evidently suffers from end-stage syphilitic paresis flails hopelessly around, knocking absolutely everything off a closet shelf that had a flashlight on it, and then there's a pitch for a miner's headlamp. I guess Ian watched the same lousy late-night TV I did in the '90s. :)
    282
  25. I love the "good nutrition" menu item. Because if I'm looking for nutritional advice, naturally I'm going to consult my microwave oven. :)
    275
  26. "Little unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as being downrange" has some of the same energy as Othais's recent remark about the effects a gun has on the people at the far end also being part of the ergonomics, just at a higher speed.
    264
  27. You've got to be a true Zip™ Operator™ to use these guns.
    261
  28. There's something oddly beautiful in the fact that a gun that is actually two guns was made by Dupe & Company.
    260
  29. "Electrolux Charlton" sounds like the name of a popular model of robot butler from a pseudo-Victorian sci-fi setting. "Ah, I see you've bought yourself a new Electrolux Charlton, Sir Henry. How do you find him?" "Oh, he's capital, old man. Makes miles better tea than the old Vickers Whitworth I used to have, you know. Better telephone voice as well!"
    251
  30. I would argue that "crew in a hurry to get something done before the end of the day" qualifies as "time pressure", in which case BINGO
    243
  31.  @MelodyMLucianoNorris-qe8lc  Well, I got curious and looked around a bit, and according to Wikipedia, the sketch was recorded in September 1970. With that, it seems extremely likely to me that it was a direct reference.
    241
  32. I feel like the museum ought to be displaying XM135 without the canopy on it. You know, for authenticity.
    240
  33. Every time I hear about another case of dangerous, usually radioactive crap being left lying around by the Soviets, I think of the pre-credits scene in Tomorrow Never Dies. "Can't you people keep anything locked up?!"
    238
  34. "Several of these pieces come out when you shake the gun" is just not a sentence you want to hear...
    228
  35. I love that her usual expression makes her look like she has a tiny mouth, and then when she meows in the dryer it opens up like some kind of missile silo. :)
    225
  36. To add a little historical background, the Marauder nameplate comes from the '60s, where it was originally the name of a trim level before being promoted in 1969 to a model name in its own right. Like its '03 descendant, the 1969–70 Marauder was a dressed-up Marquis with a moderately more powerful range of engine options and unique alloy wheels sporting the vintage Mercury-head logo. It was never intended to be a muscle car as such, but rather was aimed at what used to be called the "personal luxury" market, where "personal" translated to "a bit faster than usual, but let's not go crazy here." :) Also, the 1970 version in black is one of the most sinister-looking cars of its era. In a hypothetical cop movie where all the cars were provided by Ford, the bad guy would have driven a black Marauder with heavily tinted windows. (As an aside, the spare tire doesn't slop over the shelf in the trunk so much in similar-vintage Crown Vics I've seen. Possibly because they don't have 18-inch wheels? idk)
    219
  37. "Is that an MP5? It is! Ohhh. Now I can solve up to 800 problems a minute." - Gordon Freeman, Freeman's Mind
    217
  38. Same. The odyssey of the Carpathia and her crew is the best part of the Titanic story to me, hands down. Rousting all the stokers out of bed, shutting down cabin heat and hot water to throw every last scrap of steam at the engines, dodging ice in pitch darkness for hours at a knot or two faster than her absolute maximum design speed to arrive on the scene half an hour sooner than anyone thought they possibly could have... epic in every way.
    215
  39. Sadly, the Craftsman did not have the tooling necessary to give it the historically appropriate and traditional BROWNINGS MAUSER FABRIQUE PATENT BREVETE PATENT BREVETE BELGIQUE BELGIQUE markings. (Also SDGD, because man, this one needs it.)
    214
  40. +Stephanie Martin (Lady Azkadelia) God help you if you forget your nail clippers in your pocket, though.
    211
  41. The sponsor bit at the end lands... oddly. John's just spent 11 minutes telling everyone a cautionary tale about owning the consequences of your actions, and then Ed comes in like, "Here's a way to dodge the consequences of your actions." :)
    193
  42. "Czechoslovakia, who taught you to serialize every single metal part of a gun like this?" "YOU did, Germany! I learned it from watching YOU!"
    186
  43. "Is it underpowered?" Il Duce presumably didn't think so.
    185
  44. On the plus side, the thorium mantles can take pride in being one of the few products on the market today for which the California Proposition 65 warning is actually justified. (As oppose to, say, the small brass-faced hammer I bought a while back. I guess brass could be known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm, if you ground it up and snorted it or something?)
    179
  45. Reminds me of the British Naval Gunnery School's report on its trials of the Gabbet-Fairfax Mars Automatic Pistol, circa 1902: "Singularly unpleasant and alarming. No one who fired once with the pistol wished to shoot it again."
    177
  46. "Wait, won't that just ingest all the muzzle gases from the cannon and flame out its own engines if it fires? ... Yes, yes it will. All righty then! This is fine."
    174
  47. World's deadliest Best Buy manager.
    172
  48. (obligatory "this was no boat accident" joke) It's amazing how far you've come from the early "standing in a brick tunnel, describing an obscure gun into the world's cheapest mic" days--doubly so when one considers that your principal medium is actively hostile to your subject area. It's so nice to see hard work actually pay off in this day and age.
    170
  49.  @Simoneister  I'll give him a pass on that one, because he clarified that it was a pair of pairs, which is just the miracle of buying two of two of them. The odd number is harder to forgive. ;)
    168
  50. An interesting side detail: I got curious and looked on Google Street View, and the 1644/1646 Park Avenue lots are still vacant eight years later. That's pretty unusual for Manhattan, where real estate is usually too valuable to leave vacant for long. (It's also slightly wild how completely intact 1642 and 1648 are, even in the most recent shot after the disaster. It's like someone just came along and pulled those two buildings out like teeth.)
    167
  51. I've read (but cannot personally attest) that another significant problem with the Gyrojet from a military standpoint--beyond the awkward operation, hilarious inaccuracy, ineffectuality at point-blank range, and inconsistently reliable ammunition--was that when it did work, it left a big obvous vapor trail pointing directly back to where the person who fired it was. Sort of like the sniper rifle in Halo, come to think of it. That's a bit of a liability in a combat arm. :)
    166
  52. Any time "attempted" appears in the title of a shooting video, signs points to amusement.
    166
  53. I miss the dishwasher that was installed in my house when I moved in. It was from 1963, had a door like a bank vault, sounded like an entire army group mobilizing through the kitchen, and would reduce any dish to complete cleanliness in 45 minutes, tops. It was a sad, sad day when it finally stopped working and had to be replaced by a modern machine that is much quieter, but takes like five hours. (Probably isn't going to last 50 years, either.)
    166
  54. "What goes on in back is what people are most interested in." —Doug DeMuro, 2023
    163
  55. Which is impressive, since it's a royal pain in the butt to disassemble a 1911 when you're sitting at a table with all the time in the world. #*%* barrel bushing, what were you thinking, John?
    156
  56. I love that no one thought to omit the flash hider from a gun that is only to be used with tracer ammunition.
    153
  57. You broke the picnic table! How many people can say they came to Maine and smashed up an old picnic table with the bipod of a CMG-3? :)
    143
  58. "Wear gloves, wear eye protection," says Frank, not doing either. :)
    140
  59. "Prop collecting is rife with..." (Pause while Adam searches for a more diplomatic way of saying "fraud.")
    137
  60. As always, I love the wild optimism of the adjustable sight. 900 yards! Sure. No problem. I'll get right on that. :)
    137
  61. I love how cheerfully optimistic late-19th/early-20th-century adjustable rear sights are. Nine hundred meters, forsooth. :)
    134
  62. The most utopian feature of the wildly utopian Star Trek universe: the Federation has a working Do What I Meant interface.
    132
  63. Players of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas will be uncomfortably familiar with the concept of the Bushmaster device. Where do the Raiders get all those combat shotguns?
    129
  64. I can't decide which deadpan phrase I enjoy more: "No parakeets were found" or "a series of chronically malfunctioning photocopiers".
    129
  65. One thing that my mind keeps coming back to is that, on top of all the other horrors these people faced, "water" is a pretty generous word for what the Thames is made of (and probably more so back in the '80s, come to that).
    127
  66. To expand on the "belt type" concept a little: The ancient console humidifier I had in the '80s didn't have a belt, as such, but I could see how the system it used could have been set up to have one instead of the rigid structure mine had. This is going to be a little wordy, since I'm trying to describe something that would better be shown in a picture, but basically, the water reservoir had a vertical rotating drum in it, kinda like a miniature Ferris wheel--the one in mine was about, say, 80% of the machine's height in diameter (it was about the same size as your modern woodgrain unit) by maybe eight inches wide. The edge of the drum was covered with an absorbent plastic wool material, sort of like a softer Scotchbrite. It would rotate slowly through the water at the bottom, and then the rotation would bring the wet part in front of a fan mounted at the top; this would cause the water caught in the absorbent material to evaporate, and the rotation of the drum would then carry the dried-out part back down into the water. So, same basic principle as the console unit you have, but it got the water from the reservoir up to the fan by mechanical means. The capillary-action wick thing in modern units seems like it's basically the replacement for that arrangement, probably dreamed up in order to eliminate a moving part. On the plus side, the surface of the drum being constantly dried out again by the fan meant that no given patch of it ever stayed wet long enough for anything to grow on it (as long as the machine was running), although the water reservoir did still need treatment to keep it from getting manky. We had a bottle of stuff kind of like you would treat a fish tank with, which you were supposed to throw a capful of in the tank whenever you refilled it. It would run for about a day on any sane setting. On the minus side, it had that extra moving part, and eventually the mechanism to turn the drum wore out in mine, causing a shrill bad-bearing noise that made it unusable in any room where someone was trying to sleep, and really annoying anywhere else. Hence, I suspect, why they don't make them that way any more.
    125
  67. +DoctorWeeTodd In fairness, I would totally take Crazy Cucumber as my ninja codename.
    122
  68. It never fails to tickle me that White got screwed in the Rollin White Patent Deal himself. Whoever inked that license contract on the Smith & Wesson side must have laughed himself to sleep that night.
    121
  69. Ian's auction previews have a sort of cumulative depression effect if you watch a bunch of them in a row. You start out going "Oh hey! Cool!" and finish up face-down on the couch, sobbing "So many beautiful things! I shall never possess them!" :)
    117
  70. Remember, this is the same British Army that adopted a rifle action devised by the inventor of the detachable box magazine--the most revolutionary development in rifle magazines, basically, ever--and then chained the magazine to the rifle and refused to issue extras, because the stupid sods will only lose them if we do that, you know.
    117
  71.  @quillmaurer6563  Reminds me of how the locomotive engineer racing the flood down the Little Conemaugh to Johnstown tied his whistle down. People may not have realized the continually howling train was specifically warning of a flood, but anyone who heard it knew something had gone terribly wrong.
    117
  72. That's just a variation on British inshore ASW doctrine of the First World War. This called for rowboats with a couple of strong lads aboard to keep watch for German U-boat periscopes along the southwest coast of England. If they spotted one, their mission was to row up to it, throw a burlap bag over it, and then beat on it with a hammer in hopes of damaging the optics inside. I kid you not.
    117
  73. "Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable--you are a poor scientist, Dr. Zimbardo."
    116
  74. "... You know what, I'm gonna leave this spring alone." I love the little genuine touches like that. A lot of guys would edit them out. I'm glad you don't. :)
    114
  75. Heh, three-round magazine. 'Cause hey, it worked for the Berthier.* * it didn't work for the Berthier
    110
  76. Maybe we recover from our parents, but in a lot of ways we also discover (often to our dismay) that we have become them. I realized I had become my father a few years ago, when I saw a print ad for one of those outdoor hot tubs. In the ad, it's set up on the deck behind a house on a snowy winter night, and a couple are enjoying some champagne surrounded by steam and soft lighting. Younger me would have seen that as intensely aspirational, but middle-aged me who has become his father instantly thought, "Oh God, their electric bill." :)
    107
  77. Not gonna lie, I saw the thumbnail and thought, "Oh, Doug is doing a Honda HR-V. Interesting."
    106
  78. Data point: In the northern half of Maine where I live, we don't have a natural gas pipeline network, so most of us are burning No. 2 fuel oil delivered by truck, either in forced air systems or, as in my 100-year-old house, boiler-radiator systems. A few avant-garde types (like my father) are using propane out of cylinders instead, like you, and of course there are the holdouts who still burn wood, and those pellet stove wackos, but fuel oil is still by far the most common choice in these parts. Hot water systems are still pretty common as well, although that's at least partly because central air is pretty uncommon in private homes. It's only hot enough to need AC for about six weeks a year, anyway.
    105
  79. "Sir, if you can afford one of my cars, you can afford a heated garage to keep it in." - Ettore Bugatti, to a customer complaining that his car didn't like to start in the winter
    99
  80. VROOOM BANG BANG CRACKLE "It's pretty quiet." :)
    97
  81. That pause between the ride collapsing and the bystanders reacting is down to one of the odder quirks of the human psyche. When most people are in a situation where they aren't expecting anything to go wrong, and something happens within their sight that's abrupt and catastrophic but doesn't involve them directly enough to trigger their fight/flee response, it takes a moment for their minds to process that the situation has changed. It's basically the brain taking the time to ask itself, "What the hell did I just see?"
    95
  82.  @chrysanthemum8233  "Picture the average person. Now remember that half of all people are dumber than that." - George Carlin
    94
  83. "What's that, Sledge? A silencer?" "No, my dad invented this. It's called a loudener!"
    93
  84.  @Ailasher  There is such a thing as gallows humor, after all. A thing doesn't have to be pleasant to be funny.
    92
  85.  @alexnoyle  In either case, they're not going to get there.
    89
  86. Also needs to go away: the way GM vehicles put their reverse lights on when they aren't in reverse (or even running), but the owner did something with the remote power door locks.
    88
  87. And now you can write it off as a business expense! Clever. :)
    87
  88. Also, you'll know immediately if you leave it open because of the way the drag makes the car pull to the right. :)
    85
  89.  @ethericboy  The A-10 isn't a fighter that was retrofitted for ground attack; it was designed after the weapon, specifically to carry it, and was built as ruggedly as possible, specifically to make it best able to carry out its role. It's also much, much, much slower.
    84
  90. Ah, the ol' "give the little guy the machine gun" gag. A classic.
    84
  91. I love how unsubtly shady things were back in those days. At least nowadays an arms company would try to PRETEND one of its founders wasn't involved in making purchasing decisions for its principal customer. (See also, the LeMat/Gen. Beauregard connection mentioned in a previous video.) Back then? Eh, who needs deniability? Meanwhile, Tucker & Sherrard were over there playing the classic Eli Whitney "spend the government's advance on something else" scam... it's all so cheerfully blatant. It's a shame industrial corruption isn't still so lacking in pretense.
    82
  92.  @deusexaethera  Real men sound like they have a pretty unhealthy lifestyle.
    82
  93. So is a refrigerator, though, so... :)
    81
  94. I don't know if the situation has changed at any point in the last 30 years, but back when I was in high school, I came to the conclusion that once you've bought a gun magazine--as in, one issue of any one gun magazine--you have read all gun magazines. Never before in the history of human conflict have so many recycled so little by so few so many times.
    81
  95. "It's not gonna hurt you..." DING! "...(sigh)" was a sublime comic moment.
    80
  96. So, at first, I wanted to call this device The Bowdlerizer, but then I decided that, in honor of the era it comes from, it should be dubbed the PearlClutcher 2000. (The modern HD version is, of course, the Pearlclutcher 5000, because camelcase is no longer "in", and for some reason marketers skipped right past the 4th and 5th millennia after "2000" ceased to be futuristic.) My favorite bit of TV censoring from that era has to be from the network broadcast edit of On Golden Pond, in which Jane Fonda's character's declaration that "my father is a goddamned poop" has the "god" muted out, but not the "damned". It's doubly funny because "poop" is in the original line, not a redub!
    79
  97. Please accept these five (5) points for your employment of the critically underused word "crossbuck".
    78
  98. On some level, I have to admire the pure blind confidence it takes to receive a tech package for a machine you've never seen before, look it over, and decide, "Well, all these tolerances are wrong. Must have used Budge, I don't know why they keep reprinting his books."
    78
  99. I love how the insane, baroque complexity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is reflected in its native firearms design language.
    77
  100. Just better hope they're on the low end of that 30-50 range.
    76
  101. In addition to these fine pistols, that's where they make the immortal Mauser FABRIQUEHERSTALHERSTALBELGIQUEBELGIQUE FABRIQUE Model FABRIQUE 534545.
    75
  102. "The Pope? Bah. How many divisions has he got?" "Less than one, Comrade Stalin, but they do all have these sweet pinfire revolvers."
    75
  103.  @doryna_sira  Plus, people (both teachers and students) in those days simply weren't trained for emergencies like they are today. Everyone involved had to make up their responses as they went along. This fire is one of the reasons for the modern ritual of the school fire drill.
    72
  104. Yes, it would have been nice for Ian to address the awesome power of these things, given that Dr. Watson was shot in the shoulder and the wound gave him trouble in his leg for years thereafter. :)
    71
  105. The Yugoslavs had an interesting habit of going their own way with this stuff. For instance, take the PAP M59/66--it's a copy of the SKS, and uses the same Soviet cartridge, but the grenade launcher on it is for NATO rifle grenades. (I think their AKM-alike had the same thing going on.)
    70
  106. It does, but that's not why it's effective, is what I believe he's getting at.
    70
  107. I won't lie, there is a certain beautiful, terrible majesty in the idea of someone being injured by a piece of safety equipment.
    70
  108. The Soviets seem to have been fond of that "let's just stuff more powder into an existing cartridge, so that people have the best odds of sticking it into old guns chambered for the original and blowing them up" thing. They did the same with 7.63 Mauser -> 7.62 Tokarev.
    69
  109. Bonus points for not even including that one guy who was there on the car deck at the time, but just shrugged and said "nah, not my job, mate" rather than, er... check that his subordinate's critical function was being performed?... in the round of wrist slaps.
    69
  110. In the section about the weasely package wording, I noticed that if you keep reading, the claim on the package about being the best product goes on to explain that it's the best at one very specific part of the process, which would be an entirely unsatisfactory outcome if it was the only thing that happened. Marketing!
    67
  111. Thanks to his description here, I can only picture Admiral Rozhestvensky being played by Captain Archibald Haddock from the Tintin comics, screaming random nouns at his subordinates through his megaphone in transports of fury. "Visigoths! Bashi-bazouks! Triangulators! Anacoluthons!"
    67
  112. Right? I'm like a damn vampire over here, constantly feeling compelled to pause and count them.
    67
  113. "You only have one setting, on or off." (Bob Newhart voice) That... that's two settings.
    67
  114.  Shade Crenshaw  Funnily enough, movies with sound were still a pretty new thing when that law was passed.
    66
  115. Victoria's reaction to her reserve chute failing reminds me of something Mercury astronauts Al Shepard and Deke Slayton wrote in a book they co-authored long ago. Paraphrased from memory: "A test pilot doesn't think, 'I'm gonna be dead in ten seconds.' A test pilot thinks, 'Hell, I got ten whole seconds.'"
    66
  116. Best company name ever.
    66
  117. I'll see your daisy wheel failure and raise you an exploding chain printer. Boy howdy, there was a reason those things were enclosed in those armored housings. :)
    65
  118. I love that the Swiss felt the need to include a warning label on the optic because of the tritium. "CAUTION: THIS PRODUCT WILL BE VERY SLIGHTLY RADIOACTIVE FOR A FEW YEARS. DO NOT EAT."
    63
  119. "This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here."
    63
  120. " Columbia, Houston, comm check."
    60
  121. Dust is indeed a scourge in any industry where it's a byproduct. For instance, my father worked his whole career as an engineer for a paper company, and they grappled with dust control in their mills pretty much constantly. (And also bearing maintenance, come to that. There are a lot of rotating parts in a paper machine, most of them turning at quite high speeds.)
    60
  122.  @frother  Eh, he had it coming, bitching out the whole crew for one guy's honest mistake.
    59
  123. "Welp, I guess I'm not clocking in today."
    59
  124. Scott made one of the classic errors: assuming a Furby's brain is behind its face. :)
    58
  125. Hey, my parents had a 1977 Monte Carlo Landau! It was the first new car my father ever bought, when he got his first raise at the job he took straight out of college. He custom-ordered it and everything, which meant he not only intentionally bought a metallic-chocolate-brown car with a beige vinyl roof and tan vinyl interior, he specifically instructed General Motors to build it that way. The '70s, man. Strange days.
    58
  126. +IR4TE There are also those of us who instantly remember the gun shop scene from the original Terminator. "The 12-gauge auto-loader." "That's Italian. You can go pump or auto."
    57
  127.  @macgeek2004  To be fair, 007's own workplace safety record is so abysmal, it's no real surprise that he has such a disdain for H&S professionals.
    57
  128. Finns always have the best nicknames for military hardware. I remember reading somewhere that the Finnish Air Force pilots who flew the Brewster Buffalo in WWII called it something that translates to "Butt Walter", which, well, to quote Pfc. Garlick in Good Morning, Vietnam, "I have no idea what that means, sir, but it sounds very negative to me." :)
    55
  129. Hey, guess what? 7:00
    55
  130. As a kid, I remember being told in health class that the reflex to close your eyes when you sneeze is there because if you didn't, your eyeballs would pop out. Which is a hell of a thing to drop on a ten-year-old with seasonal allergies.
    55
  131. This reminds me of the time I was at a commercial indoor range, and a guy came in with a .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda he'd just gotten back from being customized. It had something like a 1½-inch barrel. You could feel the blast through the divider walls between the lanes. When he was done, there was a visible fan pattern of unburned powder on the floor in front of his station. Everybody who worked there stopped what they were doing and gathered around to marvel at how much extra money this guy had paid someone to ruin a perfectly good, already quite expensive revolver for him. He was incredibly proud of it.
    54
  132. Ian's (immediately corrected) misspeak about SWAT team members practicing "ballistic entries" gave me the image of a SWAT officer serving a search warrant on a home by being flung bodily through the living-room window by one of those giant circus cannons, and for that, I will always be grateful.
    54
  133. "Well, we can't do a carbine version of the Lebel because that would reduce the tubular magazine capacity unacceptably." "No worries, I've come up with a new concept that uses a Mannlicher-style magazine." "Great, how many rounds does it hold?" "Four. Well... probably three." "... Ship it!" Ah, military procurement.
    54
  134. Mr. Knoble appears to have been one of the few known makers of American Chinese Mystery Pistols. Even the rounded magazine thing is reminiscent.
    53
  135. Fun fact: In Japan, the word for "stapler" is ホチキス, hochikisu - literally "Hotchkiss" rendered in the Japanese syllabary. Prominently marked Hotchkiss-brand staplers were the most popular office tools in the country for much of the early twentieth century, and the name entered common use as a generic word for the tool (similar to the way English-speakers tend to call any adjustable wrench a Crescent wrench). Point being, you guys might have been better off with one of those. :)
    53
  136. "Not sufficiently obvious that it was out of ammo." I know what they meant-- that it was hard to distinguish being empty from a malfunction--but still, on the face of it, that's a funny thing to say about a gun. Generally speaking, the fact that it won't shoot any more is the place to start your investigation. :)
    52
  137. What a difference 16 model years make.
    52
  138.  @amdphone2750  It's also not as prone to corrosion as the usual plas... oh.
    52
  139.  @Metallica4Life92  "An undertaking usually involving danger; an exciting or remarkable experience." I'd say that qualifies, for some values of "exciting". :)
    52
  140. True story: In the 1970s, there was a joint Navy-CIA operation to place a wiretap on a Soviet military telephone cable that ran under the Sea of Okhotsk. Eventually the Soviets found it, and when they did, they had no trouble determining who put it there, because a number of internal components were marked PROPERTY OF UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
    52
  141.  @confuseatronica  I'm guessing "gloves" was the answer more often than not.
    52
  142. It's an engine. Pistons go back and forth, a thing turns, stuff happens. It's not really a thing that needs a ton of explaining. ;)
    51
  143.  @-zgizmo224-5  I keep coming back to the remark quoted in Midnight in Chernobyl, said by a Soviet Navy vet who went to work at Chernobyl after his service, on first getting a look at an RBMK: "How can you possibly control this hulking piece of shit?"
    50
  144. Minor side note: Concorde was well-known among the people who could afford it for most of its career, but its profile with the general public received a significant boost in 1985, when Phil Collins used it to play both ends of Live Aid--from Wembley early on, and Philadelphia near the end.
    50
  145. I got a new bed frame for Christmas that has a light underneath it. At first I thought that was deeply silly--why is it there? in case the monsters want to read?--but it turns out that it's actually really useful for navigating those late-night bathroom breaks. You turn it on, and it just kind of makes the floor around the bed glow.
    48
  146. This weapon is the ultimate expression of the Vladof Corporation creed of marksmanship: "You don't need to be a better shot, you just need to shoot MORE BULLETS."
    47
  147. Here's a little thought experiment that popped into my head when I saw the photo of the damage to the freighter: Imagine the chaos if that had been a loaded container ship rather than a bulker. That impact would almost certainly have wiped a whole mess of conexes off the upper tiers, leaving them bobbing around at random in one of the busiest traffic areas in the world...
    47
  148. My favorite thing about the first-generation Taurus is that someone thought it looked so futuristic, they used them as the cop cars of 10 years into the future in RoboCop, which came out when the Taurus was new and still relatively uncommon. Of course, by the real 1997, cops were still just driving Crown Vics like they always had, but hey! :)
    47
  149. To be fair, he probably needed his trousers rinsed by that point.
    47
  150. "That's one of the configurations of Stoner that you just don't see very often." Yes, as opposed to the belt-fed LMG version, which I have to push out of my way to get to more interesting things in every gun shop I visit. I mean I know what he meant, but it's just funny how he said it. Right? Just me? Maybe my dad? OK.
    46
  151. Agreed, the "Ove" Glove is brilliant. The rare steam-resistant version even more so!
    46
  152. It's probably a little less docile when not being wielded by Hercules.
    46
  153. I "remilitarized" my grandfather's M1903A3 Springfield (well, technically Remington) deer rifle a couple years ago, but not to try and make the rifle worth more. I did it because when he gave me the rifle before going into assisted living (where he wouldn't have been allowed to keep it), he mentioned that he wished he hadn't sporterized it. So in my case it was more about doing the detective work, and then the work work, to undo one of an old man's regrets, if that makes any sense. In a case like that, or just as a project for fun, I think it's worth doing. (As a financial proposition, it feels more like fraud, but maybe don't go by me.)
    45
  154. There are plenty of countries where someone goes to prison after a disaster. It's often not the person responsible for the disaster in most of them, but hey.
    45
  155. About 20 years ago I worked at a (now sadly defunct) local newspaper here in the rural USA. We had a scanner in the office that was always listening for the local emergency services, for obvious reasons, and occasionally someone would address us directly. Usually it was the fire department dispatcher, casually letting us know that the current call was for equipment testing or something and we shouldn't get too excited. :)
    44
  156. It's not the kind of gun that's used to shoot people in the front of the head, I shouldn't imagine.
    44
  157. There's a certain darkly pleasing symmetry in the fact that the two most likely ways of dying inside the canyon are a) not enough water and b) too much water.
    44
  158. In the RAF of the 1960s, I expect "some sedatives" =" most of a bottle of Courvoisier." :)
    44
  159. +Jason Clark More practically, the patent official who decided a bored hole somehow constituted a non-obvious invention, and therefore granted White a patent for it, demonstrated why patent laws need to be administered more sensibly than they sometimes are.
    43
  160. Shocking. I mean, I could see it if it was Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, but...
    43
  161. I used to have one of these in my living room that would turn on spontaneously whenever I did a load of laundry. Something in the power fluctuation the washing machine caused when it switched cycles was enough to trip the lamp in a whole different room, which probably tells us something about how well my house is wired.
    43
  162. Except for the ones with the broken legs. They're not going much of anywhere.
    43
  163. Mass confusion at night was a recurring theme of that whole campaign--e.g., the Battle of Cape Esperance the previous month, with Admiral Goto convinced his ships were being fired at by other Japanese ships, while Admiral Scott was equally convinced that his ships were firing at other American ships, and nobody really had a solid idea of what the hell was going on before it was all over except possibly the crew of USS Duncan, who managed to get shot up by both sides for their trouble.
    42
  164. The Magnavox machine spinning up reminded me of those big ol' clothes-washer-style DEC hard drives from the '70s. I remember being taken on a tour of a large local corporation's offices in elementary school and being shown one of those. The guy giving the tour held up a decommissioned platter from it and told us all that each side of the disk could hold as much information as an ENTIRE BOOK. Little did I dream that 15 years later, I would be finding those things still in service in a couple of the computer labs at the university I went to...
    42
  165.  @mikeholmstrom1899  The human impulse to just press the button again when something unexpectedly stops working, rather than think about how it probably stopped for a reason, is one of the most dangerous flaws of our species. (I'm looking at you, Therac-25 operators.)
    42
  166. That navigator position makes total sense. As we've seen on this very channel, it's not really very important at all for that crew member to be able to concentrate.
    41
  167. I respect the ingenuity of whoever decided that what Louis Slotin's dragon tickler needed to be safe was a floor jack. I mean, he wasn't right, but he was ingenious.
    40
  168. On the one hand, those Circline lamps remind me of the house my grandparents had when I was a kid, because when they built that house in the late '60s, they lit the whole place with them, having been convinced by some salesman at the building supply place that they were The Future. On the other hand, spending time in that house did feel a little like being in the black-and-white part of The Wizard of Oz, because the whole place was lit with Circline lamps. :)
    40
  169. So avoidable, it took actual effort not to avoid it.
    40
  170. +Nastrael Rowe As C&Rsenal suggests, it's difficult to imagine just how little credit the generals of the time gave the men under their command. You may think generals today don't think much of their troops, but compared to the leaders of the WWI-era armies of the world, modern armies consider their common soldiers to be geniuses. WWI generals often didn't seem to be entirely convinced that theirs were even human, let alone reasonably intelligent adults. For another great example of this, consider that the British Lee-Enfield rifle had a detachable box magazine - James Paris Lee INVENTED the detachable box magazine - and yet British soldiers were expected to use stripper clips to load their rifles through the open action, just like everyone else. They were only issued the one that came with the rifle, because if you give them more than one, they'll just lose the bloody things. Or sell them and blow the money. Waste of valuable government property, either way. Life was cheap and rifle parts weren't.
    39
  171. And when drums stop, keyboard solo.
    39
  172. A lot of that stuff was probably still classified when the original MOH games were made.
    39
  173. +Andrew Suryali The near-total collapse of the German economy in 1921-24 wouldn't have helped Luger much either.
    38
  174. "Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another episode of Forgotten Hats." :)
    38
  175.  @evegreenification  I love the image of a well-dressed society gent standing just outside the cordon in front of a burning French fine-dining restaurant, holding a plate in one hand and a fork in the other, calmly finishing his escargots bourguignonne and watching the show. Possibly his manservant is nearby holding the wine. Man's only got two hands, after all.
    38
  176. You can almost see the thought process of "crap, how can I get this across without implicitly dissing everyone who's ever designed a costume or prop for Star Trek here" running in real time. :)
    38
  177. The response of the people of Lockerbie is all the more extraordinary when you consider the size of the crater that 747 made in the middle of town and the 11 residents who were killed in its making. They literally had their own problems to worry about.
    38
  178. The K-boats might have been the only submarines that were longer than their own absolute crush depth, but weirdly, they were not the only submarines longer than their test depth. The Japanese I-400 -class aircraft-carrying submarines had a 100-meter test depth and were significantly longer than that at 122 meters, meaning that they didn't have to have suffered a verticality mishap to exceed it at one end while still on the surface at the other--a sufficiently aggressive crash dive would have done it. (They were also better at turning to port than starboard thanks to their off-center conning towers. Really quite unwieldy overall. On the other hand, they pioneered the concept embodied in today's guided-missile submarines, and nobody ever gets something completely right on the first try. :)
    38
  179. Yeah, there's something really satisfying about the authority he handles that shotgun with.
    38
  180. With that crazy magazine system, they're basically tiny naval rifles.
    37
  181. I was gonna say, with Texas plates, you never know, the truck might have come with that stuff already in it. :)
    37
  182. A bold plan! It's a shame it didn't work. A bunch of diamonds being stolen from De Beers is pretty much my textbook definition of a victimless crime. OTOH, it's nice to see the Hazmat Guys have found a new career! Also, B-Roll Rampage would be a great album title. I'm just putting it out there.
    37
  183. Given that actual Thompsons operate on a mechanical principle (the Blish effect) that turns out to have been completely fictional, one hesitates to imagine what an experience a Chinese Mystery Thompson must have been.
    37
  184. Technically speaking, it has terrible accuracy but great precision, if I remember the distinction correctly from intro engineering physics. The rifle won't hit what you aim it at, but it will hit the same wrong place every time. :)
    36
  185. Punch line: dude was alone in the car.
    36
  186.  @haroldbeauchamp3770  Whether it has a purpose is not relevant to the larger matter of it being stupid. This is often true of things automotive designers do. :)
    36
  187. Something similar happened in Guadalajara in the '90s, although as I recall, in that case it wasn't caused by fuel thieves, but rather a carelessly built pipeline that ended up more or less filling the sewers downtown with gasoline. The usual Pemex incompetence, either way. There was a Seconds From Disaster episode about it, I think.
    36
  188. Well, give it time, there are still several RBMK reactors in service.
    36
  189. "Thank you for not smoking." - Robocop, Robocop 2
    36
  190. I kind of love the analog diagnostic system. Of course, within just a few years of this production, all of that could be handled by a digital computer receiving direct, discrete signals from the sensors, rather than a discriminator inferring what's going on from how different sensors affect the overall voltage on a shared circuit, but the latter is quite a clever way to do that in a world where the former isn't technologically feasible yet.
    35
  191. "Too fast, Vasiliy, too fast! These charts are laid out precisely--so many knots on such and such a course for so many seconds. And this thing handles like a pig!" - Lt. Viktor Slavin, The Hunt for Red October
    35
  192.  @ForgottenWeapons  Maybe the warlord weaponsmiths involved were adherents to the 1891 U.S. Board on Geographical Names ruling that, as part of a huge and absurdly misguided attempt to impose standardization on American place names, towns with names ending in -burgh should be forced to drop the H. This controversy raged for decades in Pittsburg{h}, with some newspapers in town still calling the place Pittsburg as late as 1923! ... OK, probably not. :)
    35
  193.  @Gundam944  Don't forget the Kriss Vector. All the hype.
    34
  194. Maybe he was a rabbit leading an army of rats. Wouldn't be the first time a dictator didn't come from the nation he was leading to war...
    34
  195. Apparently those folks didn't realize that the problem wasn't CFL technology, it was that motels almost invariably use the cheapest, crappiest examples of whatever lighting technology they have.
    33
  196. Possibly interesting side fact: The one San Francisco bridge officer who survived the hit that killed Captain Young (and everyone else on the bridge) was the signals officer, Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless, who commanded the ship for the rest of the engagement and earned his own Medal of Honor in the process. In 1984, his son Bruce II was the astronaut who carried out the first untethered spacewalk, which produced what is probably the second most famous photo of an American astronaut after the one of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon.
    33
  197. Herr Schulhof can hardly be held responsible for a) his name or b) cultural conditions in another country 130 years in the gun's future.
    33
  198. In re "why would I get a hybrid," it may be worth keeping in mind that traditional hybrids like this one retain one massive advantage over EVs: they don't take half an hour (or more... occasionally a lot more) to refuel.
    33
  199. Is Havana syndrome like Stockholm syndrome, but with cigars?
    33
  200. "... the explosive growth in the city of Minneapolis." I, uh, I see what you did there. (Also, people are complaining that the ruins seem poorly maintained? They're ruins. What are they supposed to look like?)
    33
  201.  @FranNyan  Yeah, very unlikely. Cargo trailers are designed to be as lightweight as possible, to minimize the fuel wasted hauling the trailer itself as opposed to paying cargo, so they're really not very sturdy at all.
    32
  202. I remember seeing a BBC documentary about utility usage in the UK, some years ago, which showed the havoc that happened (and probably still happens) in England's electrical grid control center every weekday. At... I forget the exact time, six or seven in the evening, a certain popular TV show ends, at which point everyone who was watching it simultaneously switches on their electric kettle. Power dispatchers sitting at their consoles watching the show themselves, so they know the exact moment the credits start rolling and all hell breaks loose. Pumped storage plants being dumped in France to help meet the demand spike in the West Country. Complete pandemonium for five or ten minutes, every weekday at 5:59 PM or whenever it is, and then by ten past six or so it's all over and everything's working normally again. Household HVAC trends on a slightly less precise timetable, admittedly, but that's what the pattern reminded me of. In terms of lowering overall demand, I think it's time we, as a society, explored the possibility of using usage patterns to identify digital-currency mines and then launching cruise missiles at them. That option should be fully tested before ordinary citizens start letting utility companies adjust our appliances for us.
    32
  203. "It sounds like the recoil from the gun exposed a lot of problems with construction in the rest of the aircraft." Yes, in much the same way that GIs in the Pacific War firing captured Japanese Type 89 grenade launchers with the baseplate braced against their legs (instead of the ground, like it was supposed to be) exposed problems with construction of their thigh bones. :)
    32
  204.  @americansupervillain4595  I've seen folks trying to popularize "-a-Lago" as a modern replacement, but I dunno, it doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
    32
  205.  @delfinenteddyson9865  Except in bullpup rifles! That's one of the things I've never liked about bullpups. The chamber is where all the bad things happen, I don't want it that close to my eyes.
    32
  206. Ah, Smill & Welson's principal foreign competition. We hate K&H in Sprangfeld.
    32
  207. The very distinctive shape of the canopy/awning at 2:24 makes the gunnery platform look uncannily like a carousel that happens to have giant cannons instead of the usual painted horses, which is fitting, since it sounds like the Novgorod was basically a carnival ride from Hell. :)
    31
  208.  @GigsTaggart  That's probably it. Daytime aircraft clearance lights are high-intensity white strobes rather than the medium-intensity slow-pulse red ones used at night; they would be absolute hell to work anywhere close to.
    31
  209. "Czechoslovakia never used drums." It's true, all of the percussion in their national music was provided by a Roland TR808. (Just one. It was kept in a vault in Prague when not in use.) Edited to wonder: I vaguely recall a video, either here or on InRange, in which some Eastern Bloc rifle or another failed you so spectacularly at a match that it ended up getting pitched into a dumpster on camera. Was that a Vz 52? I feel like it might have been, but I haven't found the video to check.
    31
  210. It never registered with me before now that Krieghoff was actually the name of a person. Talk about nominative determinism. "Well, my name is Warhope, I guess I might as well start a military armaments company."
    31
  211. In fairness, I've never seen a tangent sight on anything that wasn't hilariously optimistic at the top end.
    31
  212. It's probably just a coincidence, but the fact that it looks exactly like it was made from actual bicycle frame tubing really drives home that "made in a bicycle factory" thing. :)
    31
  213. I remember reading about a similar accident that involved two fully assembled weapons being lost from a B-52 that broke up in flight over North Carolina sometime in the '60s--I think probably in James Mahaffey's book Atomic Accidents. At least one of the weapons was found to have been accidentally armed when it left the aircraft, and got something like three-quarters of the way through its firing sequence before it hit the ground. (IIRC, the Air Force later dismissed fears that it nearly went off by pointing out that the fusion initiator had failed, so even if the last arming mechanism had fired, the result would "only" have been the primary fission explosion. Very reassuring, I'm sure you'll agree.)
    31
  214. Faaaancy. Our safelight when I was a kid was a giant-but-low-power incandescent bulb that had been literally dipped in red stuff, like a cone at Dairy Queen. You could see where they got the paint on the first row of the threads and everything.
    31
  215. The look on his face when she's putting the happy hoodie on him is priceless. "What the--oh, whatever. Do what thou wilt, woman."
    31
  216. More so when you consider that most of what makes a Glock work was developed 60-70 years before, well, the Glock.
    30
  217. My favorite thing about the Warspite story, ignominious as her end was, is that she broke her tow on the way from Portsmouth to Scotland for scrapping, ran hard aground off the Cornish coast, defied all efforts to pull her off again, and had to be scrapped in place at enormous expense and in full view of a jeering public, to the monumental embarrassment of both the Admiralty and His Majesty's Government. It's as if the old lady said, "So you think you'll just discreetly send me off to the knacker's yard and save yourself a few bob, do you, Mister Attlee? Oh no, dear boy, I think not." :)
    30
  218.  @robinwells8879  The guy thinking the machine was safe as long as the power was off is especially chilling. It's completely wrong, but also perfectly logical if you don't know how this kind of setup really works. I mean, I don't know how widespread microwave ovens and medical X-ray machines were in El Salvador in the 1980s, but they're the most commonplace radiation* sources I can think of that most people in Western socities will have seen, and they work like that. * I know microwave ovens don't generate ionizing radiation, but they still work on a similar principle, with a magnetron and whatnot
    30
  219.  @gormros  Oh man, that gives my headache a headache.
    30
  220. "We're gettin' payments in Euros," he says, sounding like he's not quite convinced that's a real currency. :)
    30
  221.  @highmolecularweightRDX  Ah, the Internet, where people Have Feelings™ about things that happened 218 years ago. (Also, Theodore Roosevelt routinely carried a handgun while he was president--probably a prudent idea, since he became president because his predecessor was assassinated. Mind you, it didn't do him a ton of good in 1912, when he was running for re-election and got shot on his way to deliver a campaign speech. Which he delivered anyway, because he was Theodore goddam Roosevelt. But I digress.)
    30
  222. After which, presumably, he moves to New York, assumes the identity of socialite Lamont Cranston, and becomes a scourge of crime.
    29
  223. Or two of three, depending on how you look at it.
    29
  224.  @osakablinladen  Probably hollandaise would go best.
    29
  225.  @lastburning  Yes, as in "can be inflamed". The "in-" prefix doesn't have the same meaning there as in words like "invisible".
    29
  226.  @beargillium2369  I was going to make a joke about the ZiP™ SBR™, but upon reflection, that wouldn't be fair to this gun. The Volcanics were really beautifully made, it's just the weedy ammunition that lets them down.
    29
  227. Jim Kirk did it in a cave with a box of scraps!
    29
  228. I love how the proportions of the 115mm shell case (I'm guessing coincidentally, but still) make it look very much like a giant 7.62×54R round. Even the taper looks similar. (Also, the cloud of dust that erupts from every surface on the outside of the tank when the 115 goes off.)
    29
  229. "It's very impressive, but I'm afraid we wanted a simple block of flats and not an abattoir."
    29
  230. During the playback of the DFD21 error, I keep picturing some hapless 18-year-old Bundeswehr conscript, left alone in the control booth while his superior goes to the john, stabbing frantically at buttons and trying everything he can think of in a steadily rising panic while the computer voice lady goes completely off the rails and the tone generator has a total meltdown. In my head, it has the same comedic energy as the scene in Modern Times where Charlie Chaplin can't keep up with the pace of the assembly line.
    29
  231. "It looks like someone described the real thing to the designer over the phone," as one of the guys on the old Top Gear once said about a Chinese knockoff of the Rolls-Royce Phantom.
    28
  232. I've also seen it described as a "crackle finish".
    28
  233. I know, right? You just want to go and click to a higher tier.
    28
  234. I'm... not sick of gasoline-powered cars. #statisticalsamplesize
    28
  235. Similar things are happening to libraries in the US, when they aren't just being closed outright. My local library was a dull little brick building from the 1950s, full of books. A few years ago the town government washed their hands of it and turned it over to a "friends of the library" society, who seem to have decided that the problem wasn't the town being too cheap to run a library, it was that the library wasn't interesting enough. They had a huge fundraising campaign and completely remodeled the place into some sort of Media-Driven Community Center. Conspicuously missing from the radical new floorplan: the stacks. You know. The part where the books go. These are apparently the kinds of things that happen when people stop regarding educational resources as educational resources--that is, public services requiring support--and regard them instead as insufficiently productive profit centers.
    28
  236. I agree about the handling; I had been reading horror stories for years about how poor the Tokarev's ergonomics are (one memorable review described it as having been designed for "robot claw hands"), but when I finally got one I was surprised by how comfortable it is. I guess I must have robot claw hands. :)
    27
  237. Well, this generation Azure is basically a convertible two-door Arnage, and the Arnage debuted in 1998 and was styled to resemble its predecessor, the 1991 Continental, and that was derived from the 1982 Mulsanne, so... there you go.
    27
  238. It's the radio call that really does it for me. "Hey, so I think I killed a bunch of people just now, but I got a schedule to keep, so seeya later, shitlords."
    27
  239. As a motorcyclist friend of mine, who was once nearly sideswiped in slow-moving rush-hour traffic by a BMW, screamed while reaching into the open driver's window and ripping the turn signal stalk off the steering column, "GIMME THAT! NOT F---ING USING IT ANYWAY!"
    27
  240. According to family legend, sometime around 1958 my grandfather (who was a member of one of the U.S. Army Reserve's competitive shooting teams at the time) needed to run a water line from a newly drilled well to his house. To do this, so the story goes, he dug a trench between the well and one of the house's concrete foundation walls, then used a sandbagged M1903 Springfield and a handful of Cartridges, Armor Piercing, Caliber .30, M2 to drill a hole in the wall. He may have inadvertently assassinated the furnace with the shot that finally penetrated the wall. As with all legends, I can offer no hard evidence that this one is true, although we did find a partly used box of 1950s-vintage M2 ammunition in his sock drawer when he moved to assisted living a few years ago... ;)
    27
  241.  @michaellind3653  "Wait, we should hear the Nazi sympathizer out" is never going to be a good take.
    27
  242.  @rohesilmnelohe  I may be wrong, but I don't think @wurfyy's complaint is necessarily based on a need for full auto, as such. :)
    27
  243.  @simoncleret  On the plus side, you don't have to wait for Windows to update if it happens to be Tuesday.
    27
  244.  @alexnoyle  I don't know with certainty that someone isn't going to ring my doorbell right now and hand me a briefcase containing a million dollars in cash, either. There's nothing in the laws of physics that says that can't happen... but we both know it won't.
    27
  245. I remember the instructor making a particular point of the "HK slap" when I did the "rent a machine gun" thing with an MP5 at an indoor range once. The range employee who showed me how to work it was a laconic character--his actual words, as close as I can remember them a few years later, were "... an' then give 'er a smack. You can't [redacted] around with it, just whack it in good shape. It's German, you ain't gonna hurt it." Which rather set the tone for the whole experience. :) (The "safety briefing" portion of this same instructional session included the sentence, "Let's try an' keep it outta the ceiling," which turned out to be pretty easy with the ol' MP5. The old Mk I IBM Selectric is harder to control, although the consquences of losing control of a Selectric are less dramatic.)
    27
  246. It perished with honor.
    26
  247. I lived in the Bay Area for a couple of years in the mid-'90s, and was always a bit leery of the entire MacArthur Maze (the confluence of I-880, of which the Cypress Viaduct was part, I-580, and I-80 at the east end of the Bay Bridge). Not only is it a colossal and confusing mess (that at the time was still under construction, rebuilding from Loma Prieta), it has flyovers stacked on top of flyovers stacked on top of surface roads, and it's mildly amazing the whole thing didn't collapse in '89. I miss a handful of things from my time out there, but commuting to work on those freeways is not one of them...
    26
  248. "Experimental Charlton" should have been the designer's nickname, like Carbine Williams. "Oh dear, here comes old Experimental Charlton again, wonder what mad gadget he's come up with this time."
    26
  249. Kiraly's "keep selling the same gun" approach reminds me a little of Wilhelm Bubits, who worked at Glock in the '90s and has since made something of a career of traveling around the industry developing pistols that are very like Glocks for companies that want to compete with Glock. :)
    26
  250. "Shooter ready?" "Non!" "Stand by..." "Merde."
    26
  251. It probably wouldn't happen nowadays, since the current patent code requires that an innovation be non-obvious to be patentable, but those were different times. (You could patent a new non-obvious process for making the holes, but the holes themselves would probably not pass muster with a modern patent judge.)
    26
  252. Also needs an underscore between the words.
    26
  253. I love that they made it out of camouflage-print material... and then went ahead and put a huge, bold, instantly resolvable pattern of evenly spaced parallel stripes on it with all the strapping. I know that in practice the idea was that most of it would be covered up with pouches and equipment, but even so...
    26
  254.  @x808drifter  My personal favorite bit was "You get more for your bang--literally," which seems to be an attempt at a stock marketroid hype phrase that didn't even land properly.
    25
  255. The chronic failure to understand the inverse-square law on top of that is just a fun bonus. :)
    25
  256. It may be worth noting that spears of the type seen here weren't commonly thrown in medieval warfare. Javelins were, but they tended to be shorter and usually had barbed heads, since one of their main uses was to get stuck in an enemy's shield and make it too unwieldy to use. A javelineer would generally carry several since he wasn't getting them back, but a spearman would be very reluctant to throw his only weapon away.
    25
  257. In college in the early 1990s, I once witnessed a weeks-long flamewar on one of the school's internal Usenet groups in which one student vehemently insisted against all comers and in spite of all evidence presented that the proper nomenclature for shotguns was ".12 gauge," and if you didn't accept his word on that, you were the worst kind of moron. At an engineering school! I think he knew he was wrong a fairly short way into the adventure, he'd just backed himself so far up the tree by that point that he felt he had no choice but to double down and keep yelling. :)
    25
  258. A lot of Canadian signage does things with their two languages, English and French, similar to the "ABL" monogram on this rifle. My personal favorite is the ice hockey arena in Ottawa, which used to be called the Corel Centre several sponsors back. Because the name in French is the same two words in the other order, they painted a circular design at center ice that just said COREL CENTRE COREL CENTRE over and over again, so that it read both ways at the same time. (It's now the Centre Canadian Tire Centre, which doesn't trip off the tongue quite as readily. :)
    25
  259. Radium-dial wristwatches weren't radioactive enough to be dangerous to their owners. The people who painted the dials, on the other hand...
    25
  260. "Just this once, Rose, everybody lives."
    25
  261. 8:52 "Development would likely have lasted for many years were it not for--" (my brain, at deafening volume: "THE FACT THAT WAR WERE DECLARED") "--a declaration of war between the Austrian-aligned and Prussian-aligned German states in early 1866." Good job, Ian. In your place, I'm not sure I would have been able to resist the temptation. (Also, argh, you tease. My copy hasn't shipped yet. :)
    25
  262. Reminds me of the gun Mark Twain describes himself carrying in Roughing It: "I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson's seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult."
    24
  263. "SAVAGE BATTERY 4" - also an excellent name for a punk band!
    24
  264. Istanbul was Constantinople Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople Been a long time gone, Constantinople Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks'
    24
  265. @ I kind of miss "you know what kind of cheese this is?" He hasn't used that one in a while.
    24
  266. Tiny gremlin dogs or humongous Eastern European guardian dogs, there is no in between. :)
    24
  267. "You have better visibility in this thing than in a submarine." Um... (OK, presumably he's thinking of the periscope's 360° panning capability, but keeping in mind that a) only one crew member can see out of it, b) it really has a very small field of view it can see at any one time, c) that field of view is only a few feet above the surface and d) it's only useful at a very limited depth, that's a really bad analogy. :)
    24
  268. Good grief. It's like you folks have never heard heard of comic exaggeration.
    24
  269.  @webmasale  unfortunately, my time machine is broken, so I can't go back to 1985 and take one.
    24
  270.  @thelmagreenwood3377  "In a situation in which you would have to be catastrophically unlucky to be killed, never assume you are not catastrophically unlucky."
    23
  271. "Well, you know, we had a few beers, next thing you know, there we are in Czechoslovakia..."
    23
  272. When I was a kid, I had a family friend who went to what was then North Texas State University. He worked for a while at the university's campus radio station, KNTU. While he was there, the university's name changed to "University of North Texas", and there was a running joke for a while about whether the powers that be would unthinkingly try to adjust the station's call letters to reflect the new name. (They didn't. It's still KNTU.)
    23
  273. I had a Swedish friend in college whose cat was named Snabblagad (which I'm probably spelling wrong, as I never saw it written out). She claimed it was Swedish for "easy to cook". :)
    23
  274. The men whose battle stations were basically inside the 14-inch guns were their era's real-life equivalents of the guys stationed in the Death Star superlaser subway tunnels. :)
    23
  275. It's funny how these lessons have to be learned over and over again. Remember the VW Phaeton? Big-ticket luxury car, meant to compete with the Mercedes-Benz S-class et al. Completely flopped because who's going to pay S-class money for a Volkswagen? Never mind that it arguably was that much money's worth of car, the badge created the automatic expectation that there was no way it could be worth the asking price. Also, they obviously should have called it the XL R 8.
    23
  276. I remember reading somewhere that humans are the only animal that will go toward an unexpected loud noise to find out what it was... now that dodos are extinct.
    22
  277. I'm sure the one wearing a hat had a pipe in his coat pocket, just waiting to light up once he was done testing grenades. :)
    22
  278. My favorite detail is that it was particularly troublesome in dusty conditions, and virtually all of 1930s Italy's imperial ambitions centered around North Africa. It wasn't just that they were also operating there, they were pretty much only operating there. Classic. (failure tune from The Price Is Right plays here)
    22
  279. For best results, particularly in teahouse shootouts, you need a couple of Chinese Tokarevs with the infinite ammo cheat enabled.
    22
  280. ... and it's all on fire.
    22
  281. "Give the new boy the rundown on the rifle, will ya." "See this here? Push it down, now you're killin'. Pull it up, now you're killin' faster."
    22
  282. Yeah, it seems to me like this had as much to do with the train being a maglev as the Titanic sinking had to do with the ship having that one dummy smokestack (which is to say, nothing).
    22
  283. "A pom pom is an excellent weapon when you are using it but a horrid thing when the other chap has got it." - Sgt. P.C. Jonas, 43rd (Suffolk) Company Imperial Yeomanry, on his experience in the 1899-1902 South African (or Second Boer) War; quoted in Stephen M. Miller's Volunteers on the Veld. Jonas was talking about the Maxim-Nordenfeld QF 1-pounder autocannon, but the principle is similar; the Second Boer War was British forces' first taste of what a war against an enemy with even approximate technological parity would be like. Unfortunately, it seems Lord Kitchener et al. learned few lessons from the experience.
    21
  284. Weirdly, I knew that because of how sportscasters used to pronounce the name of Karch Kiraly, the volleyball player.
    21
  285. I used to, but everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.
    21
  286. We have them up north, too. Every year in Maine, there comes an evening when they start singing in the swamp not far from my house, and I know that spring has finally arrived...
    21
  287. Now all I can think of is that bit from the old M*A*S*H episode: WOUNDED ETHIOPIAN SOLDIER: (speaking Amharic) KLINGER: I think he's thanking you. HAWKEYE: Well, that's Haile Selassie of you, sir.
    21
  288. "The sky above the port was the color of TV connected to a DAP visualizing the output of Alec's microphone."
    21
  289. "What Browning had come up with was a gas port in the barrel here, which blows gas downward, hits this cap, which throws this lever down in this circular arc, which hits the bowling ball and sends it rolling down the ramp, where it falls into the bucket, which pulls the rope down through the pulley, which lifts the cage with the chicken in it at the other end of the rope, the chicken pecks at this tray of seed, the flint attached to the chicken's beak hits this steel plate and makes sparks, that ignites the priming powder, which sets off the counter-charge that drives the bolt backward, and that cycles the gun. Hiram Maxim had a different take..."
    21
  290.  @alexnoyle  Vanishingly improbable is vanishingly improbable. All the rest is wishful thinking and semantics. It's a cross between a cult and a scam, plain and simple.
    21
  291. The implication being that it's not the answer to the question the Swiss police were actually asking, either.
    20
  292. You just reminded me of the video with Bloke on the Range in the sauna wearing the complete wool Tommy kit.
    20
  293. The IJA made their own (cargo-carrying) submarines as well. Meanwhile, the IJN had its own explicitly-land-based aircraft, in parallel with its carrier-based aviation.
    20
  294. Heh, when I saw WarGames the first time, the theater showed the reels out of order. I still don't really understand that movie's narrative sequence.
    20
  295. The scene: a Victorian gentleman's club. One man observes with curiosity and concern as another lowers himself gingerly into an armchair, muttering in obvious discomfort. "I say, what's the trouble, Sir Edward? Lumbago acting up?" "No, I shot a brigand last night, and it's quite done in my back."
    20
  296. The dueling dis tracks of the late 19th century.
    20
  297. Well, I mean, they did go out of business twice in three years, so...
    20
  298. I know, right? I spent my entire adult life struggling against people touching the damn screens (seriously, I worked in a network ops center and everyone else there was a screen toucher, despite the fact that they weren't touchscreens then, wtf was that about?), and then suddenly it became the thing you have to do. This is how I know there are gods and they are against me.
    20
  299. "Plagiarize! Let no one else's work evade your eyes! Remember why the good Lord made your eyes so don't shade your eyes but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize! Only be sure always to call it please 'research'." - Tom Lehrer, "Lobachevsky" (1960)
    20
  300. Would you say it's making you... give a ship? I'm sorry. In my defense, you started it. OK, technically Sal started it. :)
    20
  301.  @logangraham2956  Building a turntable with sufficiently accurate 33⅓, 45, and 1800 RPM modes might be challenging. :)
    20
  302. ... the third one ducks. Thank you, we're here all week.
    19
  303. "Which is, by the way, a fantastically excellent name."
    19
  304. +Paul Fabrique One tends to doubt it can be a pleasant experience being shot, full stop.
    19
  305. +Paul Fabrique Anyone else remember the old Street Samurai Catalog for first-edition Shadowrun? "Wonderful. Now I can flatten light ammo against body armor faster than ever before." :)
    19
  306. They missed the barrel extension, but some maniac lopped off the hammer spur. You hate to see it...
    19
  307.  @Quert_Zuiopue  Realistically? It's probably not anywhere this year.
    19
  308. I have a friend who had a mid-'90s one of these. As far as I can remember, only two things broke on it in all the years he had it, but they were both kind of important things. One was the transfer case, which was expensive, but the other one was much more dramatic: the ratchet holding the driver's seatback upright. We were on the 580 outside Oakland one day, carpooling back from work, and WHOMP suddenly he's sort of lying down with his head in the back seat rather than, you know... driving the car. That was special. Got to love that mid-'90s Chrysler interior build quality. :)
    19
  309. Good luck with that out-of-warranty air suspension.
    19
  310. I've grown jaded enough to assume that the manufacturers only really put that on there so people can't sue them after they ignore it and hurt themselves.
    19
  311.  @SetitesTechAdventures  Huh. OK, fair enough. I didn't think of TOSLink as being the kind of things that get unplugged and plugged back in a lot. In any application I've used them in, they get plugged in and stay that way until I move to another house. :)
    19
  312. Fortunately, Webley had the good taste not to turn around and copy Enfield's No. 2 Mk I* version, possibly because they recognized that double-action-only revolvers are daft. :) I've long had a fondness for the Webley top-break revolvers. I have one of the .380 Mk IVs, but I don't shoot it any more, as it's pretty worn and doesn't quite keep proper time any longer. Would love to have one of the later marks in .455, but sadly I'm in the US, where virtually all of those that are to be found have been ruined.
    19
  313. "Zat vill be adekvate. I vill zecure zis area."
    19
  314. I wondered about that. The undervoltage batteries probably don't help either.
    19
  315. Lovely! Now all we need is a .22 rimfire Gabbett-Fairfax Mars. Presumably it would have to be .22 Magnum. :)
    18
  316.  @PedroThePanda64  Ask your doctor if clipackizine is right for you.
    18
  317. What really struck me about the Stop once I got my own was how small it is. I mean, yeah, you can sort of see that here, but for some reason it didn't really register until I was holding one. Even for a .32 it's tiny wee.
    18
  318. Oh wow, I remember Circline lights. My grandparents had them the hallways and such of their house when I was a kid. They were in normal Circline ceiling fixtures, though, not these... things. The ghastly character of the 1960s-tech fluorescent light they made was the same, though! To bathe in their (showerless) downstairs bathroom was to get a sneak preview of what one would look like as a week-old corpse discovered in one's living room armchair by neighbors alerted by the smell.
    18
  319. Imagine the size of ballpoint pen Universal Disassembly Tool it would have taken to do that.
    18
  320. As a friend of mine once edited a magazine ad for a hygiene product: "It's new, it's neat, it's discreet, and it hardly ever blows up any more."
    18
  321. "I think it's worth pointing out that this is, in fact, objectively the INcorrect way to hold a pistol." Epic. As Ian describes him, Joe Hale reminds me a bit of Malcolm Bricklin, whose eponymous '70s car company was basically the prototype for DeLorean (gull wings doors, massive government grant scams in a place where no reasonable person would build a car factory, and all), and who then went on to found YugoCars, Inc., the company that imported the Zastava Koral to the US, badged as the notorious Yugo. Mind you, Bricklin also founded Subaru of America, so, y'know, stopped clock twice a day and all that. But the whole "super-confident serial entrepreneur who lurches bombastically from disaster to disaster" thing sounds very similar.
    18
  322. Scott's maniacal cackle when something especially ridiculous has just happened will never get old.
    17
  323.  @lairdcummings9092  The accounts of the Kent State incident I've read come across a lot like the Boston Massacre of 1770, just with more modern hardware--poorly trained troops way out of their depth in a chaotic situation for which they were not the right tool in the first place, with ineffective leadership, panicking.
    17
  324. See also: the Roman numerals on Italian guns made between 1922 and 1944.
    17
  325. What's especially sobering about this is that those of us who live in the rural USA know that pretty much every small town in the country has That Railroad Crossing, the one all the locals know and loathe. The one folks have tried to get the railroad or the state or somebody to show some interest in fixing for years, if not decades. They always say it's going to get done, but somehow or other it never quite does. Well, except for the subset of us who live in towns where the railroad's gone, I suppose.
    17
  326. Years ago, I took an introductory machine tool class as a mechanical engineering tech major at a flagship state university. We broke up into teams and built little single-cylinder pneumatic reciprocating engines from drawings provided as part of the course materials. We weren't in training to be machinists; the purpose of the course was to give us a practical understanding of what the machinists who would have to build the stuff we eventually engineered would be up against. Most of us had never seen a machine tool in person before the start of the course.  We did way better work than that.
    17
  327.  @fien111  And body armor with a back plate. "Who's gonna shoot me in the back in a tank?"
    17
  328. "Oh, why did I do this? I'm regretting my life choices."
    17
  329. To be fair, losing your entire fortune in railroad speculation was the national sport for much of the second half of the 19th century. We think the economy is a roller coaster in modern times? Boy howdy. Just plug "panic of 18" into a search engine and see how many different autocompletes you get...
    17
  330. This is also increasingly so in the era after effective antibiotics. :/
    17
  331. "Makes sense in theory" applies to a great many things about the G11. :)
    16
  332. "Yuri... you've lost another submarine Tu-22?"
    16
  333. That's Scott's grandad! His name is also Scott. "Our" Scott is actually Scott Ballistics III. (note: this is not true. probably. :)
    16
  334. In fairness, the impossibility of that was obvious at the time to a lot of people who weren't Sir Douglas Haig.
    16
  335. What strikes me most about this accident is that the failure wasn't even strictly one of radiological safety. In any industry, screwing around with malfunctioning machinery without following a rigorous lockout/tagout procedure is a huge no.
    16
  336. "A goddamn cook!"
    16
  337. The one I have has two augers which rotate toward each other, dragging the snow into the center and up the chute (where I think there's a third one to fling it out, that can't be seen from outside the housing). They turn much more slowly than that, but they're also helical metal blades with something like 15 horsepower behind them, so the effect is more like that bit in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where the boat is getting slowly but inexorably chopped up by the ship's propeller. :)
    16
  338. It's true! I had mine at a commercial range once, and the only other person there was a young guy running in his brand new fancy somethingorother (I want to say it was one of the civilian SCAR variants, but I don't remember for sure what he said it was, and all these newfangled brown flashlighty rifles look alike to me). When he saw me setting up, he came over all excited. "Dude! Is that an M1 Carbine?! Where'd you get it? Is it real?" (I'm still not sure what he meant by that last part. I mean, it obviously wasn't an Airsoft gun...) It kind of took the shine off a little bit when my magazine fell apart on me (the floorplate popped off, causing it to shoot the spring across the room and vomit rounds all over the floor), but hey, that wasn't the rifle's fault. Those 30-round M2 magazines have always been the weak link. :)
    16
  339. Nietzsche teaches us that when you stare into the EOTech, the EOTech stares also into you.
    16
  340.  @exothermal.sprocket  Furbies do not have souls.
    16
  341.  @sinisterthoughts2896  I'm just going to sit and admire the phrase "the pinnacle of adequate" for a while.
    16
  342. As opposed to mid-century Soviet guns, which all seem to have been designed with LEGO minifigures' pincer hands in mind. :)
    16
  343. A similar philosophy was attributed to Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton: "A test pilot doesn't think, 'I'm gonna be dead in 10 seconds.' A test pilot thinks, 'Hell, I got me ten whole seconds.'"
    16
  344. I believe back in the day, MAD Magazine would have filed this under the What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Dep't.
    16
  345. For the record, the only correct answer to the question asked in the first reply to this comment is, "How come you don't mind your own business?"
    15
  346. Upon rewatch, I love the way the Army decided to label the flashlight clips near the bow gunner's position, so that he wouldn't mistakenly think it was a place to stow a sub sandwich or something.
    15
  347. Well, to be fair, it came out of nowhere. Nobody could possibly have seen World War II coming... oh wait.
    15
  348.  @christianelzey9703  Or worse, World War I.
    15
  349. "For engineering reasons, we've had to almost completely redesign the mechanicals of the gun." "Oh, so we're keeping the ergo and the aesthetics?" "Yeah, not so much."
    15
  350.  @jan-reiniervoute6701  Reminds me of that story in the column Ian wrote for Popular Mechanics about the Vickers gun, where the British Army put something like 5 million rounds of obsolete .303 through one Vickers just to get rid of it. :) edit: found it! https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18971/forgotten-weapons-the-vickers-gun-is-one-of-the-best-firearms-ever-made/
    15
  351.  @nvil82395  Psychologically, in fact there is. It's called a backchannel--listeners dropping periodic signals to acknowledge that they are paying attention. Most people make those sounds while listening, and periodically pause to invite them while speaking, without being consciously aware of either. (Mind you, listeners usually achieve a bit more variety in those signals than Ian does in this video, but hey, man's got other things on his mind. :)
    15
  352. I remember being in an airport or train station or some similar public place, years ago, and seeing a guy in a hoodie walking around with a Chihuahua in the hood. I got the feeling they went everywhere like that. :)
    15
  353.  @ytucharliesierra  Well, we are still talking about ~6 grains of black powder here. Barrel length can only help so much.
    15
  354. "Finally something I can use to get those damn naval aviators off my lawn."
    15
  355.  @MongooseTacticool  And its astronautical brother, "go fever."
    15
  356. In the grim darkness of the far future, there are only space rifles with 3-shot space magazines.
    15
  357. "I'm well out of range. He couldn't hit an elephant at this dist--"
    15
  358.  @CruelestChris  The submarine-launched strategic precision strike mission. The I-400s were built wtih the specific purpose in mind of hitting the Panama Canal with what amounted to a cruise missile strike (there was lip service paid to recovering the aircraft, but no one realistically believed that part was really going to happen, including the pilots). Prior sub-carried aircraft had only been used for scouting.
    15
  359.  @ballyastrocade5672  "Welcome, friend! Can I help you find the valuables? Would you like a bag?" - Golden guard dog
    15
  360. I remember seeing an early analog synthesizer (I want to say possibly an original ARP Odyssey?) that had an aftertouch function, where you could get one voice by pressing a key normally, but switch to a different one by pressing harder--sort of like the faux volume function on this piano, except you could set the second voice to be a completely different instrument if you wanted. It mainly stands out in my memory because if you didn't select a second voice for the aftertouch, it didn't have a default one to fall back to, and instead just made a weird buzzing noise. This was probably not intended to be musical (if it was intended at all), but as they say, the street finds its own uses for things.
    15
  361. The funniest part of this to me is the idea that the mayor of Cambridge had presumably seen the newspaper accounts of the actual Sultan of Zanzibar's visit to England, and thus knew what he looked like, but somehow couldn't tell that an Englishman with shoe polish on his face was not the same man.
    15
  362. Admittedly, "the best general on the Western Front in Europe" was not a terrifically high bar. Sort of like being the fastest runner in the nursing home.
    14
  363. +bisus Usually those names come from the old Latin ones. Almost anyplace that has a name ending in "-ia" is either being called by the name the Romans called it, or in the case of places that were unknown to the Romans (e.g., Pennsylvania), a latter-day Latin coinage specifically aping the Roman style.
    14
  364. +gtracer66 Early airplanes are like that as well. The aerodynamic principles were the same, because, well, laws of physics, but there's that distinct sense that the designers simply didn't know yet what an airplane was supposed to look like. :)
    14
  365.  @LethalByChoice  "Can" is not the same thing as "probably will". There are always edge cases. Sure, you'd have to be catastrophically unlucky to be killed by either cartridge at that distance, but in matters like this, never assume you are not catastrophically unlucky.
    14
  366. Interesting! Is that why the desk is set up with the drawers facing outward, instead of toward the person sitting at it? Those crazy Byzantines, always doing things their own way...
    14
  367. The Finns copied the method from a French technique from the Great War: https://youtu.be/olLjXYKfUYA
    14
  368.  @es68951  Do you see torpedo boats?
    14
  369. All of which is true, in comparison with the quietly lethal and tremendously messy electric power industry we have now.
    14
  370. Scent hounds are natural comedians. :)
    14
  371. Colt spelled it that way anyway at the time. I have a 1903 Pocket Hammerless that was made in 1919 for the US domestic market, and it's marked "CALIBRE .32 RIMLESS SMOKELESS".
    14
  372. Agreed, what you hear on video isn't really what they sound like thanks to limitations of the recording techology. That said, in my experience black-powder rifles have a much deeper sound than modern ones, probably because the powder deflagrates so much slower. They make more of a boom than a bang. (And flintlocks do go "chuff", but then they go boom. :)
    14
  373. A similar name selection process, cued by a spam email from a Mexican pharmacy, led to the creation of Dr. Zazox Wazoxazole, alien mad scientist.
    14
  374. And a wallet. And a watch. (But not spectacles or, one hopes, testicles.)
    14
  375. The thing about problems with paper availability hits me where I live--literally. My hometown huddles like an abandoned dog next to the ruins of what was once the greatest paper mill in the United States. Newspapers dwindled, phone companies stopped making directories, book printing moved overseas, and most remaining domestic publishers started buying their paper from places like Brazil, where it could be had far cheaper. Our mill closed in 2008, everything of value ripped out by scrappers working for the bankruptcy executors, the rest left to crumble quietly away by the riverside. Sic transit gloria mundi.
    14
  376. All I'm envisioning now is that scene in RoboCop where everyone at the police pistol range stops what they're doing because Murphy has just opened up with a machine pistol. :)
    14
  377.  @ClockworkChainsaw  It was perfectly possible to take a photograph of oneself in the 1800s, it just took longer and involved a lot more work. You weren't going to hold a 100-pound wet-plate camera at the end of a backscratcher, after all. :)
    14
  378.  @gushasford  If you need an army, if no one else can help you, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... the A-Team.
    14
  379. It wasn't officially secret, but it wasn't widely publicized either (for relatively obvious reasons). Few people outside the program knew about it until it started turning up in documentaries years after the fact, when the national trauma was less raw and the people doing the reporting were less worried about the optics.
    14
  380. His reaction to the dryer was priceless. "WHAT WITCHCRAFT IS THIS?!?"
    14
  381. @Nefanbeb Reghad It's still more realistic than the SPAS-12 in the same game, which can somehow fire simultaneously from both the barrel and the... magazine tube??? if you right-click. :) ("That's Italian. You can go auto or over-under." "What?" "Yeah, I don't get how it works either. You gonna buy these guns or not?")
    14
  382.  @SedatedandRestrained  The last tenant put a piranha tank for failing underlings there, but the licensing for pirahna tanks is a massive secondary expense for a show-offy accessory that most evil masterminds simply don't need.
    14
  383. The only thing it was missing was the classic sound of a round metal plate falling to the floor and spinning down to flat rest, which should've been the last thing before he came back on camera. :)
    14
  384. I remember back in the '80s, my own small New England town's fire department justified the purchase of a massive ladder truck by pointing out that though the tallest building in town is only three stories, it's three high-ceilinged 1920s stories, most of the basement is not actually underground, and it's set well back from the road on all sides, so if you ever had to get someone off the roof, you'd need around 150 feet of ladder to do it. Mind you, what they really wanted to do was renovate the bay doors of the fire station. The town council denied the funding to do that, so they bought a truck that, when it arrived, turned out--oh dear, would you look at that?--not to fit through the doors. Well, you can't expect us to leave this multi-million-dollar investment sitting outside, can you?
    14
  385.  @seansimpson4472  Or, more cynically, when you're dealing with money men, if you don't let them screw you a little, they're more than happy to screw you a lot.
    13
  386. 19th-century hold-out pistols: when you'd have been better off bringing a knife to a gunfight.
    13
  387. Apart from the safety lever and oddball markings, it looks like it's basically a copy of a Webley British Bull Dog (ca. 1872), which the Belgians were notorious for knocking off in vast quantities for decades. They were, indeed, gate loaders with a swing-out ejection rod.
    13
  388. +Sckhar Leviathan Hmm. Y'know, joking aside, it would actually be useful if it had a flashlight in it. One of those newfangled micro-LED ones could probably be worked into that form factor somewhere. Me, I'd be holding out for one that is also a working tire pressure gauge. That would be handy.
    13
  389. Well, I'd say it's pretty straightforward: Beyond the simple brutality involved, it's controversial because it was poorly designed, ethically precarious at best, and sloppily executed; lacked anything approaching proper oversight; and was generally lousy science of the kind that sets the profession's image back decades in the eyes of the general public.
    13
  390. "Never assume the user is not a total idiot" is one of the guiding principles of infantry rifle design, though, especially in the era of widespread conscription.
    13
  391. I agree, it's so annoying to have to keep telling my Japanese microwave that I really want everything in miles per hour.
    13
  392.  Tropic Lightning  I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that "this gun is not meant to be practiced with" is not quite the ideal design approach.
    13
  393.  @ianzander5057  They're more efficient and cause less local pollution than the coal-fired kind.
    13
  394. Memo to self: Never, ever go outdoors. Also, I suppose TWA 2 vs. United 718 doesn't really count, but technically, everybody on both airplanes did fall into the Grand Canyon.
    13
  395.  @alejandrocarvajal5157  I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess, based on similar experiences in non-firearms-related sectors, that it's one of the things you're not supposed to do, and they drill it into the newbies really hard that you're not supposed to do it, but the experienced ones do it all the damn time because it's faster and/or easier and They Know What They're Doing.
    13
  396. "Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night nor Tokugawa revanchists stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
    13
  397. Nevil Norway, Wallis's deputy who took over as chief engineer of R100 when Wallis left the project--and who would go on to fame under a pen name as the novelist Nevil Shute--spends a fair number of column inches on the R100 project, and the political mess that was R101, in his memoir Slide Rule. He, too, had grave reservations about the corners being cut by the R101 team, but they were ignored when he tried to raise them to the Air Ministry, because he was, after all, working for the competition.
    13
  398. Except if the M1 worked like software, omitting that tiny piece of clip guide rib would somehow cause the oprod to occasionally warp through spacetime and impale the rifleman's left butt cheek from behind.
    13
  399. Missed opportunity: "If you've seen the movie Zulu, you've seen these. Faasands of 'em." :)
    13
  400. "Ah shite, Sid, there's gotta be a better way." "Shut yer gob and hop, Dave."
    13
  401. Doug didn't touch on it, but a big part of the reason why fancier interiors weren't available in those days was because the prevailing belief (both among manufacturers and a lot of the buying public) was that if you put a luxury interior in a vehicle mainly used to haul children, the kids would just ruin it.
    13
  402. Having never handled a suppressed firearm, I'm curious now whether a suppressor would make it harder to tell that you've had a squib. I mean, without one, the difference between "bang" and "phut" is pretty obvious even with hearing protection in place, but with one... ? That might be interesting to test, if there were a way to do it safely.
    13
  403. There's that WWI-themed one where he asks rhetorically of the Germans (in reply to a Hague complaint about the US forces' use of shotguns), "Didn't you f*ckers invent flamethrowers?"
    12
  404. I love that even for a development test item, Colt in 1909 put such a shiny finish on the gun that more than 100 years later, I could still catch a glimpse of Ian's camera's REC light in it a couple of times. :)
    12
  405. They'll almost certainly all be written off regardless. No one's going to be willing to take the liability risk of selling a car that's been involved in this kind of incident to the public, whatever its apparent condition. All it would take is one lawyer, possibly years down the line, finding out that the VIN of a car that caused a completely unrelated injury or death could be traced back to the Fremantle Highway fire...
    12
  406. The paper mill where my father worked fought a constant battle against dust hazards. He was one of the company's in-house mechanical engineers for his whole career and spent a fair bit of his working time on the problem, when he wasn't managing internal construction projects or dealing with another head of the industrial explosion hydra, boiler safety.
    12
  407. The IMO "expert" bullshitting the Mauritians about how safe bunker oil is reminds me of Thomas Midgley, the industrial chemist whose team developed tetraethyl lead fuel additive in the 1920s. For a while, to counteract the negative reaction his invention got from people who drew the obvious conclusion from the fact that it's got lead in it, he gave press demonstrations showing how harmless TEL was by washing his hands with it. He eventually had to give up doing those demonstrations, take a few months off work, and go spend some quiet time on his farm. Recovering from lead poisoning. True story! (Midgley went on to invent chlorofluorocarbons. Also a true story.)
    12
  408. That "lo-poly early-3D FPS" look.
    12
  409. Eighty years ago, he'd have been the man to see if you needed something strategic and you didn't want the War Office knowing too much about it.
    12
  410. I did think of a game when I first saw it, but that game was Fallout 4 . If there were an "Automatic Receiver" mod for the bolt-action hunting rifle in that game, I'd like to think it would look like this. :)
    12
  411. This is a good example of what the late Leo Marks called "SOE-mindedness". :)
    12
  412.  @oOSonicexeOo  A similar effect can be observed by parking a modern "compact" pickup next to, say, an F-150 from the 1970s.
    12
  413.  @D0NtPh34rTh3R34p3R  Ah, the "my mechanical watch fell in the water" technique.
    12
  414. Yeah, it simultaneously amuses and annoys me how many modern manufacturers seem to think that "off-road" means "anywhere that isn't paved". I suppose it's mainly to pander to the consumers who think likewise, and automotive engineers don't really believe that some clown who happens to be on a dirt road is having some kind of studly wilderness adventure that requires specialized equipment. :)
    12
  415. Just for the record, that was the standard steel helmet pattern used by the German armed forces, police, and fire services starting in 1916, long before the Nazi era.
    12
  416. It was 1947; chances are, whoever was responsible for those rules hoped they would cause problems for the German public. The postwar grudges mentioned in the narration very much ran both ways.
    12
  417.  @highfever3139  It was a black powder cartridge, so I very much doubt it.
    12
  418. Well, if your history courses were anything like the ones I took in high school, you ran out of school year long before you reached 1978.
    12
  419. With a dash of Lahti L-35.
    11
  420. Oh man, these things. Proof that bad ideas are not a 21st-century innovation. Given how much trouble percussion revolvers occasionally have not accidentally firing the chamber next to the one intended, I would be really leery of one that purports to be able to fire only half of the chamber intended. :)
    11
  421. At that point, they could call me MIRV Gryphon. ... I'm sorry, I'll... I'll wait in the car. (Who here is even old enough to get that stupid joke? :)
    11
  422. If you watch closely, the guns lying around on the bookshelf usually change to suit the topic of discussion in these videos. :)
    11
  423. I would want mine to be able to make pre-2014 F1 engine sounds. Very loudly. On the outside of the car. Just to mess with people.
    11
  424. Addendum: It's also the name of the special class of federal firearms license which makes the list relevant (formally the 03 FFL, "Collector of Curios and Relics", as opposed to the 01 class held by dealers). If the buyer doesn't hold an 03 FFL, guns on the C&R list are subject to the same transfer rules as everything else. (Technically it's not just the list; any firearm becomes C&R-eligible 50 years after its date of manufacture, regardless of whether its model is specifically mentioned in the document.)
    11
  425. Y'know, I can't help but think that the engineer who came up with that "bury the thermostat sensor in the wall, then dial it way down [or would that be up? - ed.] to compensate for the proximity of the refrigerant lines" hack was really proud of it. It avoids all that complicated manufacturing that would be required to give the probe access to internal air and yet hide it from view. So elegant! It works fine as long as nobody does anything weird, and who's going to do anything weird with this grade of fridge, right? Right? Heh. No one at Guangdong Fridge Factory No. 3 saw Alec and his huge wadge of warm soda cans and his salvaged GPU fans coming. :)
    11
  426. To be fair, you don't hear about the thousands and thousands of buildings that stand there unexcitingly every day, not killing their occupants, because there's nothing noteworthy about that.
    11
  427. The worst pictures I've ever seen in a car ad was on a local classified ads website here in Maine. The listing was for a mid-'80s Pontiac... I forget, either a Grand Prix or a Bonneville, I think. Not really important. Anyway, it had two photos. One was of the inside of the car, taken from outside the driver's door without even rolling the window down, so it was mostly just a reflection of some trees. The other one showed the car parked by the side of the road out in the countryside in the autumn, and was clearly taken with the intent of getting a picture of the scene, not the car. The shot was centered on the middle of the road--only about a third of the car was even in the frame. My theory has always been that this was a car the owner didn't want to sell, but was being forced to put it up for sale by someone else, and so had done the most quarter-assed possible job of posting the ad in hopes that no one would be interested. :)
    11
  428. I recall an episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway? from the early '90s in which one of the presenters (I can't remember which one, maybe Tony Slattery?) had to improvise a song, the last two lines of which were "Drive across the lane, straight into a pond / And on the way kill bloody Noel, Ed, monds!" He... didn't seem entirely like he was joking.
    11
  429. "If necessity is the mother of invention, desperation is the drunk uncle." - Vince Houghton, Nuking the Moon
    11
  430. Oddly enough, given how much more famous Pompeii is, I first learned about it as a child in a National Geographic article about Herculaneum.
    11
  431. I can't remember now which Rolls-Royce review it was that elicited, "I look out over this Spirit of Ecstasy and it reminds me that I'm better than all these people."
    11
  432. Makes sense. Silver is a pretty soft metal, with a Brinell hardness number of just 24.5, but it's still significantly harder than the lead alloys used in modern bullets, which typically run between 15 and 20.
    11
  433. Reminds me of the tag on my WWI Spanish S&W K-frame clone in 8mm French Ordnance, which was marked "Chinese??? S&W copy?? .32 S&W????" One out of three isn't too bad, I suppose. :)
    11
  434. Yeah, I was not expecting a cat to make a sound even close to "AARGH!" but here we are...
    11
  435. @John Smith Propaganda comes from governments. What you're protesting is just random bullshit on the Internet. :)
    11
  436. Aldous Huxley got there in 1932 with Brave New World. "Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children..."
    11
  437. For just a second, I was convinced we were about to hear about someone who stepped in a bight.
    11
  438. Be honest, once it was on the drawing board, could you resist building one just to see it?
    11
  439. No nametag?
    10
  440. Adrenaline crash is a helluva trip, especially if you've got to talk to some rando with a camera crew while it's happening.
    10
  441. It's a rooster, too. Everything I thought I knew about metal lawn animal biology has been called into question.
    10
  442. I don't even drink alcohol, and I'm happy that the cocktail-menu goal was hit, just because at this point it feels like it wouldn't be a proper Headstamp book without one. :)
    10
  443. Well, if he was paying any attention at all, he must have had some idea based on the helm and engine orders they were giving... (Speaking of which, modern ships surely don't work this way any more, but I can't shake the automatic mental image of the chief engineer and his mate down in the engine room, looking up from their morning tea as the bridge telegraph suddenly rings "all ahead full" and glancing at each other in consternation.)
    10
  444.  @dgpsf  It's like the opposite of how movies converted to 4:3 by pan-n-scan often had the credits sequences squashed instead to avoid cropping the text. When I was little and didn't understand how any of this worked, I always wondered why, in the openings of old Westerns on VHS, Clint Eastwood always looks like he's 17 feet tall and weighs 94 pounds. I assumed it was like that in the original and was some bizarre artistic choice by the director. :)
    10
  445. "Disperse in the name of His Majesty's Imperial Fruit Company!"
    10
  446. ♪ don't whiz on the electric fence
    10
  447. I love how inconsistent the ejection is in the slo-mo at 1:50. The first empty comes out and just kind of hangs around; the second one zooms straight past it and, evidently, into orbit, while the first one is still on the screen when the third one comes hurtling out. :)
    10
  448.  @mcnultyssobercompanion6372  The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which doesn't provide any actual legal protection, but does mean there would probably be a lengthy court battle waged by preservationists if any owner tried to demolish it.
    10
  449. "I don't know that I'm actually hitting the target, though." Eh, minor detail.
    10
  450. In hindsight, I feel like "Mon Dieu! We need more rîflès!" would have been a perfect tagline for a T-shirt to promote the book.
    10
  451. This is the same country that had a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824) decades before anyone got around to founding a National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1884). Priorities, man.
    10
  452. I used to work in an office park that was about half a mile from Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. Once the USAF Thunderbirds were in town to perform at an air show at Hanscom, and on the Friday before the show weekend, they made a point of passing over the office park as low and loud as they could around midafternoon, to see how many car alarms they could set off. (Answer: All of them.)
    10
  453. Is it at the end of your arm, or in a jar?
    10
  454. My first thought was of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus orchestra's performance during the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944. I wonder if they played "The Stars & Stripes Forever".
    10
  455. "Awake, my Muse! Portray the pleasing sight That meets us where they make Electric Light. Behold the Electrician where he stands: Soot, oil, and verdigris are on his hands; Large spots of grease defile his dirty clothes, The while his conversation drips with oaths. Shall such a being perish in its youth? Alas! it is indeed the fatal truth. In that dull brain, beneath that hair unkempt, Familiarity has bred contempt. We warn him of the gesture all too late: Oh, Heartless Jove! Oh, Adamantine Fate! Some random touch—a hand’s imprudent slip— The Terminals—a flash—a sound like “Zip!” A smell of burning fills the started Air— The Electrician is no longer there!" - Hilaire Belloc, "Newdigate Poem" (1893)
    10
  456. @Anguila Hombre And would require "Rifle Ammunition", of which there is only one kind in the game.
    10
  457.  @zachthompson8688  Al Brady and his boys, on the other hand, did try to buy them from a sporting goods store, and got gunned down in the middle of the street outside said store for their trouble, which was and remains the most (possibly the only) exciting thing that has ever happened in Bangor, Maine.
    10
  458. They remind me of the registration stickers on the license plates of some cars around here. In my state, you get a new sticker for the corner of your plates each year, and some people never scrape the old one off. They're pretty heavy stickers, so it only takes a few years for the stack to become noticeable.
    10
  459. My favorite thing about all this jocular banter between Marconi operators is that they were doing it all in Morse code and still easily recognizing each other's "voices", which was a thing Morse telegraphers familiar with each other's work could do back in the day.
    10
  460. Yeah, Klingon tech does "dirty and janky" better than just about any other tech base in Trek.
    10
  461. I love how Ian's delivery is completely different in these instructional videos. Even when he's explaining exactly the same things in "regular" FW videos, he speaks conversationally, like you're sitting at the other side of the table. In these, his cadence totally changes; he sounds like the narrator of a classroom filmstrip from the 1980s. (I assume it's an artifact of recording the VO for this type of video separately, as opposed to the live-on-camera delivery of the regular vids. Still funny. :)
    10
  462.  @fien111  Fair point.
    10
  463. That guy who always yells about how he's endangering national security will be on the case.
    10
  464. I'm surprised they bothered, but I also think it's kind of nice. I've had a couple of cars with multiple clocks that never agreed; it was maddening.
    10
  465.  @colorsofsound4782  That East German one with the worn-out tape of the church bells would do it for me. At night while keyed up from trying to do crimes already? Noooo thank you!
    10
  466. "Pedal goes straight to the floor, having absolutely no effect" is up there.
    10
  467. "The Germans made vehicles in prewar factories which the Nazis took from GM's and Ford's orphaned German subsidiaries" is not the same thing as "GM and Ford both made vehicles for Nazi Germany," but thanks for playing.
    9
  468. I would guess the gentleman in charge of Remington at the time wouldn't have regarded his own sudden death as all that fortunate.
    9
  469. A lot would depend on how wimpy the cartridge was. (I'm going to guess pretty wimpy, just because they pretty much all were in the early semiautos. Except for that maniac Gabbett-Fairfax's. :)
    9
  470. +John Smith I mostly remember the brand name because Officer Tackleberry had one in Police Academy 2. Who's with me? :)
    9
  471.  @D8W2P4  It's less about the slot pattern than the heads in this case. I mean, those are clearly not finish screws, Philips or otherwise. :)
    9
  472.  @jakublulek3261  My favorite part is that when the patent expired, he went to Congress whining that the S&W deal had done him out of his rightful profits on his invention, and asking for the patent to be extended so that he could make a new deal and get some decent money out of it. Such a bill was, amazingly, passed--but was promptly vetoed by President Grant on the advice of the U.S. Army's Chief of Ordnance, General Alexander Dyer, who had never forgiven White for suing so many potentially useful Union gunmakers out of business during the Civil War. You reap what you sow, Rollin. Justice for patent trolls is rare, but so satisfying.
    9
  473. Ah, the same passage in Roughing It wherein he describes the joys of the Allen pepperbox. "To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably not done with an 'Allen' in the world." A true classic.
    9
  474. Welp, you're on a list now.
    9
  475.  @jeffprice6421  Sort of like Carbine Williams. "What are your qualifications?" "Well, I shot a revenue agent a few years back." "Lovely, practical experience is so rare in this industry. When can you start?"
    9
  476. I love it. I was already a fan of the Frommer Stop for its complete weirdness (long recoil! in a .32 pocket pistol!), and this is like the ultimate application for it. It's a crew-served antiaircraft gun for 12" GI Joe dolls.
    9
  477. "You can get into short, quick, weird positions."
    9
  478. Shotguns aren't built to withstand pressures anywhere near as high as most rifles, so it's no surprise that they don't handle barrel obstructions too well. I remember my grandfather showing me a photo once of a shotgun that came into his shop when he worked as a gunsmith in the 1960s. Its owner had stumbled over a fence while hunting and tentpoled his gun without, evidently, realizing it, and the next time he fired it the Damascus steel barrel just... unwound. Exactly what the guy thought Gramp, or any other gunsmith, could do about that is unclear, but it sure made for an impressive photograph.
    9
  479. Probably also, in some jurisdictions, simply because it's a food product and they're required to have some kind of date on them. (See also: honey, which always cracks me up, because the dates are as far in the future as they legally can be. I bought a jar of fancy Spanish honey a couple years ago that was dated, if memory serves, sometime in 2040. :)
    9
  480.  @vrisbrianm4720  Tullio Marengoni had an aesthetic, and he stuck to it. :)
    9
  481. Not only was Clark's reputation ruined in itself, but also, the not-wreck of the Jeddah inspired Joseph Conrad's 1900 novel Lord Jim, which at the time was far better-known than it is today, and kept the matter in the public mind for longer than it might otherwise have remained there.
    9
  482. He might well have gotten into arms design because he was a doctor. Between about 1850 and World War I, there was a persistent notion among a lot of people who should have known better that one of the principal reasons for the high death counts in the wars of the time was because weapons weren't deadly enough. Seriously. The idea was that if weapons could be made sufficiently destructive, capable of killing enough men in a short enough span of time, it would a) reduce the size of armies, because you would need fewer soldiers to achieve the same level of military force, and b) so horrify public opinion and policymakers that war would no longer be seen as a viable instrument of foreign policy. That was Gatling's explicit motivation for inventing his eponymous gun: he thought that by making a weapon with which one man could kill a hundred, he could save the other 99, so to speak. It was a widely espoused view in his time. (One notable exception was Hiram Maxim, who was just looking to get as rich as possible.) World War I cured most of this crazy idea's adherents of their illusions... eventually. Until the aftermath of World War II, when the same misconception put on a different shirt and became the core of nuclear deterrence doctrine.
    9
  483. To be fair, if you are any sort of military personnel and you are using a handgun in a professional capacity, your day has already gone pretty dramatically wrong.
    9
  484. Just Arizona being Arizona. :)
    9
  485. AT&T had a similar building in downtown Worcester, MA when I was in college there in the early '90s. (I assume the building is still there, but I don't know who owns it nowadays.) Huge, windowless, sinister, out of place with everything around it. In honor of the company's logo at the time, we all called it the Death Star.
    9
  486. Funnily enough, the first car I ever had was an '84 Oldsmobile that had a speedo that only went to 85 mph. I discovered one fine afternoon on a rural Interstate that the car could go much faster than that; but it was the only car I can recall owning that was faster than its speedometer's limit. (The one I have now claims to be able to go 180 mph. I haven't tested that, since I live nowhere near the Bugatti test track, but I have my doubts. :)
    9
  487.  @chartreux1532  Well, someone has to offset my strange habit of muttering "ach, aber natürlich" when something goes annoyingly wrong, despite being American. (Picked it up in German class in college. :)
    9
  488. Yeah, in an age before antibiotics (or even widespread understanding of antisepsis), even .22 Short could be threatening.
    9
  489.  @rayg.2431  Oh yeah, there are knockoffs, I forgot about that. (Mine's an Inland that's been rebarreled by the CMP pro shop, as it happens.)
    9
  490.  @USSEnterpriseA1701  The algorithm does get a bit obsessive sometimes, doesn't it? Right now it really wants me to rewatch C&Rsenal's Primer on the 1915 Chauchat.
    9
  491.  @Bob.W.  Hey, it's not Lt. Stanley's fault that the Admiralty took the most culturally significant signal in Royal Navy history out of the signals manual.
    9
  492. This bloody town's a bloody cuss No bloody trains, no bloody bus And no one cares for bloody us In bloody [basically every town any British Army unit has ever been in]. NOTE: The adjective used is not always "bloody". :)
    9
  493.  @aaronleverton4221  Hell, back in the '50s and '60s, Army rifle and pistol teams didn't wear ear protection in practice or competition, either. (Which is why my grandfather has several trophies and is as deaf as a post. At least the VA is gracious enough to acknowledge that yes, that is a line-of-duty injury, and pays for his hearing aids.)
    9
  494. If you ever do, get it detailed first...
    9
  495.  @neillathotep7386  Ah, sort of like how to parents of a certain generation, every gaming console is a Nintendo. :)
    9
  496. Well, to be fair, he was Generalísimo Franco, not Almirantísimo Franco.
    9
  497. That's kind of how an Abadie gate works, but the trigger-to-ignition-system disconnect is a lot more positive in the Abadie system.
    9
  498. This is like chiding someone for using pot holders because you won't die from a burned hand. Mortality isn't the only reason to avoid disease exposure.
    9
  499. "Well, at least I have my backup gun. Let's just hope I don't need a backup backup gun. Most people don't need that. Most people don't even need a backup gun. I guess it depends on what state you live in." - Gordon Freeman, Freeman's Mind
    9
  500. Aw, I was hoping the stocked one would have my second-favorite Mystery Pistol feature (after the gibberish lettering): a solid block of metal that has shapes on it like the working parts of a tangent sight, and range markings that count backward from 125,000 in increments of 13,329 or something.
    9
  501. Lots of cars that failed initially become collectible later on, often at least in part because they failed when new.
    9
  502. One the one hand, it was dumb; on the other hand, you got away with it, which is the least expensive way to learn a lesson. As my late grandfather, who taught me to shoot back in the '80s, told me: If you're not respecting your gun enough, it will let you know.
    9
  503. "Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side when he sees the big red light behind him... and then will start apologizing, begging for mercy. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart... what you want to do then is accelerate." - Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971)
    9
  504.  @alexdemoya2119  Minus side: they're the best shots you're ever going to be up against. Plus side: they've got .22 rimfires sighted for preposterously specific ranges.
    9
  505. @ Some people just don't appreciate the finer things in life.
    9
  506. ​ @Myomer104 "Broke into the wrong gawdang rec room, didn't ya!" (.416 Rigby goes off)
    9
  507. "Well, this project didn't really have a chance to go any further, because..." (my brain, automatically: "... war were declared.") "... around this time, the U.S. Civil War breaks out." Wrong channel, brain, but good effort.
    9
  508. You left out the part where the used ones will all have been incompetently modded and beaten to death.
    9
  509. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that it's not the first bold claim this guy has made about a few inches of tube in his lifetime.
    9
  510. Well, you get half a pound of plastic up to 1800 RPM, it's gonna make some noise. Older players take a while (and make a cool sound) spinning down when they stop playing, too.
    9
  511. Hey, cut the train some slack, it knew it had a schedule to keep.
    9
  512.  @mfaizsyahmi  Depends on the circumstances. When the design flaw in Citicorp Center came to light in the '70s, the operative factor that could have caused a collapse was a strong quartering wind, and the most likely failure scenario was that the building would, indeed, topple over sideways into one of its neighbors--potentially causing a domino effect that would have reduced most of midtown Manhattan to rubble.
    9
  513. Well, not absolutely optimal, I mean, there's a hell of a lot of heat haze out there. I guess 800 yards in arctic conditions would have its own set of challenges, though. :) Anyway, I like the vibe. I've been to too many ranges where competition wasn't even happening and yet everything felt like a competition, if you follow me. This is kinda the other way around.
    9
  514.  @malicious217  If I had been on the town council, I wouldn't even have been mad. (I'd also have been 12, and so probably not eligible, but still. :)
    9
  515. There's the armored cavalry (scouting and security forces equipped with armored fighting vehicles) and the air cavalry (airmobile assault infantry, typically transported by helicopters).
    8
  516. +MrSven3000 ... Well, for some values of "witnessed".
    8
  517. Nice! I briefly wanted to be a firearms examiner, but in the state I lived in at the time, you had to be a police officer to get that job. As an aside, the .38/200 Webley & Scott Mk IV is DA/SA; what you had there, with the DA only/bobbed hammer action, was most probably an Enfield No. 2 Mk I*. One can be excused for mixing them up, however, given that the Enfield No. 2 was a scandalously blatant copy of the Mk IV. (So blatant that Webley sued over it, only to be stonewalled by His Majesty's Government: "No it isn't, because we said so. We're the government. Shut up.")
    8
  518. +baileyboy125 And why is he capturing Wheatley from Portal 2?
    8
  519. The late Robin Sachs delivers an amazing performance of "Dulce et Decorum Est" (the Wilfred Owen poem that is excerpted in this video) in the audiobook edition of G.J. Meyer's "A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918". It's a great book, but even if it was only OK, the audiobook would be worth its price just for that. "If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs(...) My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori."
    8
  520. This is the same technical philosophy that gave us "If you can't find your torque wrench, tighten until it starts to strip and then back it off a quarter turn." :)
    8
  521.  @richardwild76  Shhhh. We classic car people don't discuss that part out loud. ;)
    8
  522. This neatly closes a circuit, since the reason such things are so rare nowadays is that they were intended to be viewed as disposable by their original users, and so the vast majority of them were handled carelessly and either lost, broken, or outright discarded.
    8
  523. This reminds me pleasantly of my favorite bits of Kitchen Confidential, which involved Bourdain's descriptions of his interactions with various "Italian-American Fraternal Organizations" in the restaurant business in New York. Different industry, same theatrics.
    8
  524.  @rodneybadger734  To be fair, Chrysler was building cars poorly long before Fiat came along.
    8
  525. I think the really impressive thing about the Nazi bureaucracy is that they wrote practically everything down, including things that any sensible regime would have kept strictly off the record. Serene in the assumption that they would win the war and rule the world for a thousand years, they thought they were compiling a historical record for far-future generations to marvel at, not a mountain of evidence that would hang dozens of them in 1945.
    8
  526.  @mustafahumar3831  Except in China, where Buicks are, for some baffling reason, the pinnacle of aspirational luxury marques.
    8
  527. "Anyone who knew anything realized that the assault rifle concept in a full-power rifle cartridge simply wasn't going to work." (eyes the M14 design team) Guys, anything to add? No? OK then. I want you to sit there and think about what you've done.
    8
  528. Not a lot of metal in an iceberg. Inconvenient!
    8
  529. The staff of the East Texas Cancer Center (the one where the same operator accidentally killed two people in two months) refused to use theirs ever again, no matter what assurances they were given that it was fixed. The hospital had to return it to AECL and get something else.
    8
  530. The captain was English; he said "I trust you are not in too much distress," which I submit is even cooler. :)
    8
  531. "Do you mind if I have a swig of this?" "Go right ahead." "Ugh! What the hell is this stuff?!" "Gasoline. Hahaha!"
    8
  532.  @aaronleverton4221  Based on what my late grandfather told me about his time with the M14 in the Army Reserve, full-auto anything in 7.62×51 that isn't mounted to a tripod or something is a party you don't really want to attend.
    8
  533. My favorite part of that is that the factory guys told him to.
    8
  534. Correct! (source: mine had a 4-speed)
    8
  535. Nah, it's just because the ships involved happen to have chosen Panama as their flag of convenience.
    8
  536. Spoilers for a 40-year-old book: At the end of Licence Renewed, the first of the post-Fleming 007 novels written by John Gardner in the '80s, Bond kills the villain of the piece with a Gyrojet pistol. As I recall (and it's been a long time since I read that book), it's described as making a hole in him like a blowtorch applied to a cardboard cutout. Those novels were... not very good. :)
    8
  537. "Chesterfields soothe my asthma best of any leading cigarette brand!"
    8
  538.  @USSEnterpriseA1701  Don't forget the ZiP™ 22™, an insult to the arts of gunsmithing and plastic injection molding (and also trademarking).
    8
  539. What really did it for me is the huge clouds of dust flying off the entire rack each time (as opposed to the little puff coming off each plate as Ian hit them).
    8
  540.  @melissas4874  That's not because they generate dangerous gases, though, it's because that's how they move the heat outside. If they didn't do that, they wouldn't work.
    8
  541.  @vitriolicAmaranth  Although you'll want to work harder to find your HEV helmet than Gordon could be bothered to do.
    8
  542. iseewhatyoudidthere.jpg
    8
  543. @John Smith Riffing on the Italian military record in YouTube comments is propaganda now? Dang. Standards have dropped...
    8
  544. IHNJ, IJLS "sneaked the tip thru" in this context.
    8
  545. ... or got dropped twice. :)
    8
  546. "I'm reading a quadruple failure, that can't happen. It's gotta be instrumentation."
    8
  547. Well, there are various meteorological conditions that hamper visibility, and then for an average of half of each planetary rotation we have this thing called "night", during which it tends to be quite dark. Those two factors account for a lot of collisions. :) (There are also quite a few sea areas that are really very crowded, especially around busy ports, and ocean-going ships don't handle so well in town...)
    8
  548. Condominiums: all the worst parts of owning your own home, plus all the worst parts of living in an apartment building.
    8
  549. Ye gods, what an image. Things no one will ever, ever need, #29,694 in a series: Internet of Shit-compatible firearms. "Sorry, my timer shotgun is being used by the Chinese government to DDOS Netflix right now." :)
    8
  550. I spent a summer in college as a welder's assistant/fire watch on a construction crew that was building an expansion to a paper mill. The part of the job that involved putting in pipelines and such in the oldest part of the existing mill was... exciting, in that "everything in here might explode and kill us all at any moment" kind of way.
    8
  551. Maybe, although it's holding a bunch of arrows and an olive branch, just like the eagle in the Great Seal of the United States.
    8
  552. Alex B IIRC, the guy crashed it within a year or so anyway, just to kind of round off the story.
    7
  553. Speculatively (two years later, hooray the meaninglessness of time on the Internet), the feature that sets it apart from a normal PPK from the operator's perspective is something the Mauser HSc was already doing--that semi-hidden hammer thing.
    7
  554. Remember, always brulée your demon carefully.
    7
  555. I felt like being that guy, so I dug up the exact quote (from series 6, episode 7, if you're also that guy): "In the olden days, I always got the impression that TVR built a car, put it on sale, and then found out how it handled. Usually when one of their customers wrote to the factory complaining about how dead he was."
    7
  556. Actual boy scouts, nearly a century before Baden-Powell's camping club, earning their Defeating the British merit badges.
    7
  557. I dunno, I mean, my Volkswagen has a roof hatch. It's made of glass and the manual calls it a sunroof, but...
    7
  558. NOOObody expects the French Inquisition!
    7
  559. More likely how high the check didn't bounce when cashed.
    7
  560.  @nthgth  When you're in Street View on Google Maps for the web, look for the black box in the upper left (of the photo pane, not including the white info area on the left). It has the address you're viewing at the top, and shows the month and year when the view you're looking at was taken at the bottom. If more than one Street View of that address is available, there'll be a pulldown there that opens a timeline where you can click back through the older ones. 1646 Park Avenue in New York has nine Street Views, ranging from August 2011 (when the buildings were still there) through June of this year. That's my favorite feature of Street View. I use it to go on little time travel adventures sometimes, looking back through the recent history of places I used to know in towns I lived in years ago, that sort of thing.
    7
  561. Let's look at this practically, though: If you're in a trench war with a World War II submachine gun here in the 21st century, something has gone fantastically wrong and you probably have bigger problems than which World War II submachinegun you've got.
    7
  562. "Mr. George Bemis was dismally formidable. George Bemis was our fellow-traveler. We had never seen him before. He wore in his belt an old original 'Allen' revolver, such as irreverent people called a 'pepper-box.' Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an 'Allen' in the world. But George's was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, 'If she didn't get what she went after, she would fetch something else.' And so she did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon—the 'Allen.' Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it." - Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872)
    7
  563. "It angers me that people are invested in the user experience they receive from high-cost consumer goods." Uh, OK. Sure.
    7
  564. I like how he says it looks "modern" when it's just about the most steampunk surface treatment you can put in a car interior. I mean, it's there as a reference to the car from the '30s. :)
    7
  565. Here in the US, they're provided by the emergency services at the scene. We don't have to carry our own. :)
    7
  566. To be fair, although they have a long history of well-made products, they've only made one other one that was actually interesting in any way (the LFA). :)
    7
  567. Probably because they're expensive.
    7
  568. I've seen similar advertisements for the Thompson gun---copy describing it as ideal for home defense, with a little cartoon of a man blazing away from his front porch at... something. As far as using a time machine to buy one from a store goes, be careful that the date you choose is not October 12, 1937, and/or the store is not Dakin's Sporting Goods in Bangor, Maine.
    7
  569. I am obscurely happy that the Soviets had a machine gun called the "DPM". Also, I second the other comments that the background looks uncannily like a playground. Sort of an industrial playground, but that does happen. There's a "structured play area" in one of the parks here in my town that looks like it was designed by East German prison architects. :)
    7
  570. People of Hearst's class didn't have taxes to cheat on, for the most part, before 1913.
    7
  571. In grad school, I wrote a research paper about the failure of the US supersonic airliner projects. There were a lot of reasons for it, but the biggest one was simply that once cooler heads prevailed after the initial surge of hype and someone sat down and ran realistic numbers, the whole concept made zero economic sense.
    7
  572.  @scratchpad7954  I did say it was a running joke. I don't think anyone there was dim enough to think there was ever a genuine possibility of it happening. :)
    7
  573. "Sorry, pal, no witnesses. It's only business."
    7
  574. I was an preteen/teen airshow fanatic in the '80s, so I remember reading everything I could find about this when it happened (which was admittedly not a lot in those days). I experienced the knock-on effects of the disaster myself the next year, when a show I was attending here in the US pushed the crowd so far back for safety in reaction to the Ramstein crash that we could barely see anything. It took airshow organizers a couple of years to figure out a reasonable balance. A few years before, in 1981, I had attended an open house at the AIr National Guard base in Bangor, Maine, and my parents cajoled me into taking the flightline walk before the show and getting all six Thunderbirds pilots' autographs on my program booklet. A few months later, four of the six were killed in a training crash. It's a dangerous business, doing stunts in high-performance aircraft.
    7
  575.  @TheRogueWolf  Surely that's just when you buy two Counter Terrorist Ians and then have one of them dual wield both of the MP5s. :)
    7
  576.  @TheCrusher72  Also known in some circles as the "gopnik stance".
    7
  577. In a similar vein, presumably because of some flaw in my eyeballs (astigmatism?), the blue part of white LEDs' output reaches my brain as if it were coming from a few degrees away from the actual source. This is always annoying, and really disorienting when the white LEDs in question are, say, the headlights of opposing traffic.
    7
  578.  @americansupervillain4595  There was also that awkward point in the '90s when another scandal came along that happened to have "water" in it, and all the reporters in America tacitly concurred that they couldn't call it "Whitewatergate" with a straight face.
    7
  579. ... And yet the supervisor in this particular incident was a sailor.
    7
  580.  @ColonelEagle  Or the Northeast, come to that. Here in Maine, with our immensely long borders to Quebec and Atlantic Canada, there are still tons of French-speaking families (although the Académie Française might disagree :).
    7
  581. Or when you print the test page. :)
    7
  582. Remember to leave room on the list for Douglas "I don't care what you just adopted, the M1 rifle shall be .30-'06. I have spoken" MacArthur.
    7
  583. My favorite thing I ever saw at a gun show was a table containing the following two items: - a book entitled How to Build a Sten Gun - a box labeled STEN GUN PARTS
    7
  584.  @kameradin8964  https://youtu.be/rCuVMx5h1x0
    7
  585. I miss the days when cars would have the stripey TURBO graphic on the side of the car rather than hidden away in the engine bay. '80s high style. :)
    7
  586. Guys, for the record, I wasn't looking for a solution to this. I live by myself, anyway, so if anyone is cooking something in the night, everyone in the house is already awake. :)
    7
  587. You really should, it's a great museum. Also, if you're interested in aviation, the New England Air Museum at Bradley Field, just over the line in Connecticut, is well worth a day (or even two, it's expanded quite a lot over the last few years).
    7
  588. To expand a little on "SGDG", the phrase translates to "without guarantee of the government," and essentially means that by granting the patent, the French government certified only that the invention was novel, not that it worked. Basically a limitation of liability--vintage CYA. :)
    7
  589. I guess once the beans are out, you have a field-expedient hole saw...
    7
  590.  @conor7154  Speaking as someone who got his driver's license in 1989: They were plenty fast enough to get into trouble with, which, I maintain, is all that matters in the real world. :)
    7
  591.  @JohnDoe-vf2yo  I think you've conflated a couple of different things in that first sentence. Operation Chastise (the Dambusters mission) was directed against hydroelectric dams in the Ruhr Valley, which provided power and water for steel production and the area's industrial transportation canal system. The dam with the heavy water plant attached was in Nazi-occupied Norway, and the USAAF raids on Norsk Hydro targeted the plant, not the dam (presumably because Allied Command didn't want to risk drowning hundreds of Norwegian civilians).
    7
  592. It also kind of reminds me of that one South African Airways 747 Combi that had a fire in the after hold over the Indian Ocean and broke up before the crew could get it over land. No one ever figured out what caused that fire either, although since it involved South Africa in the '80s, there were naturally conspiracy theories galore.
    7
  593. Whenever dogs look confused at humans barking at them, I assume it's because we're yelling gibberish in whatever language dogs have. "'Cabbage trombone ventilator'? What is this ape on about?!"
    7
  594. Getting away from the Thompson's horrendous length of pull was probably welcome to anyone shorter than six-foot-four, as well, even if the grease gun does have just a crappy wire stock. :)
    7
  595. "That's really quite a lot of blood."
    7
  596. The aesthetic of the Statesman reminds me very much of cigarette vending machines of the same era. It makes me wonder if Wurlitzer was trying for some sort of commonality of design to make the places that usually had both things in those days look more uniform or something. Like, I could easily see one of these and a cig machine standing next to each other in a late-'70s Elks Club, between the bar and the pool table. :)
    7
  597. I remember that happening when I used to visit my grandparents in the far north of Maine as a kid; one of the four TV stations they could pick up on VHF was CHSJ-TV Saint John, which had an... uneasy relationship with the CBC in those days. It often seemed as though either the station or the network couldn't hit a time slot in the butt with a bass fiddle.
    7
  598.  @sawyere2496  Bonus points if said leaf is not, upon closer inspection, actually adjustable.
    7
  599. +Jake Wallace One of the Italian companies (Uberti, I think?) makes a nice-looking replica that costs a little less than that. Mind you, enough Pyrodex to load the thing properly would probably still cost you a hundred grand. :)
    6
  600. "You could take this same action and barrel system, put it in a traditional-style stock, and shoot just as well." ... Now I totally want someone to do that. Twenty-first-century T-gewehr. :)
    6
  601. That spine lectern is freaking me out. I can't stop noticing it now.
    6
  602. +coltonsin64 I don't think "jump your bones" means what you think it means. :)
    6
  603. "Some rounds are loaded too hot, some are loaded too weak, and it would be good to have a pistol that can just digest any of those safely." So, a revolver, then. But no, no, early-20th-century autoloader designers all thought they had a better idea. :)
    6
  604. My house doesn't have a water heater as one usually pictures them, which puzzled me the first time I ventured into the basement and didn't see one anywhere. It has oil-fired hot water baseboard heating, and the domestic hot water comes from a holding tank connected to the main heating loop by a heat exchanger, so that you're not showering or making dinner with the same water that's been going through the radiators. It's the only house I've seen set up like that (although I'm sure there must be plenty of others, it's not like the heating system here is some kind of one-off handmade custom rig). Also, to be fair to Thomas Midgley (about whom I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis in history, as it happens), "As far as we know, it's harmless" was also true of Freon in his lifetime. His other most famous invention, lead tetraethyl... not so much, admittedly.
    6
  605. "It's a working magazine... mostly..."
    6
  606. I always wondered what those chrome squares on film cartridges were for, but never had a piece of equipment that actually used them. Somewhere around here, I've got my mother's old Minolta SRT201, on the back of which is a table for translating DIN film speeds into ASA. That camera has automatic nothing, so I assume all the ASA knob does is set the internal light meter's expectations, but it's been a very long time since I used it, so I can't remember for sure. Wasn't there a fancier incarnation of computerized 35mm cartridges, right before film cameras stopped being a Thing for the mass market? I seem to recall TV commercials where Kodak was predicting they would be the Next Big Thing, at almost exactly the moment when the Next Big Thing was obviously digital. Also, when you showed your first camera, it made me nostalgic for mine, an Instamatic X-15. Good ol' square-frame 126. I can still remember the smell of spent Magicube™ flash cubes.
    6
  607.  @Kalvinjj  Something similar, but lower-rent, used to be a really common conversion here in northern Maine, back in the '50s and '60s. The car body would rust out around the rear wheels first, and the owner would just sort of saw that part off and build a wooden flatbed to replace it. A lot of the time they wouldn't bother to close it off, which I expect was somewhat drafty in winter. (I've seen an old photo of my father in high school, ca. 1969, with one he'd made out of an early-'50s Cadillac. It's wintertime in the picture, and he is wearing several coats. :)
    6
  608. It has only come to light in recent years that William McGonagall was, in fact, a deep-cover Vogon advance scout.
    6
  609. ... Because later this year isn't now? Time: it's a thing.
    6
  610. So you're saying Hoboken coulda been a contender?
    6
  611. I like how you can clearly see where the spring button in the original M1918 safety selector was.
    6
  612. I just want to note that the YouTube filename for this video ends in the string "fuptnik", which I have decided is the Russian word for someone who's a bit obsessive about HVAC technology.
    6
  613. "Mr. George Bemis was dismally formidable..."
    6
  614. Spiritual cousin to that slightly wonky electrical outlet in the back room at the Cody Museum. :)
    6
  615. Knowing the Finns, they used them as sniper rifles. :)
    6
  616. I feel like "are designed to" is doing an uncomfortable amount of heavy lifting in that second paragraph, all things considered.
    6
  617. Well, that and Enver Hoxha's chronic inability to get along with any Soviet leader whose name didn't start with Iosif and end with Stalin, which had been simmering for years by that point.
    6
  618.  @shawnr771  This was intended as a military-style arm, though. Contrary to some of the more overheated WWI propaganda, soldiers on the Western Front were not actually eating each other. :)
    6
  619. I'm mildly unnerved by how preposterously easy it is to muzzle yourself with this device. Hell, Ian does it four or five times in the course of the video, and he's a professional.
    6
  620. And who still have VCRs. And answering machines. :)
    6
  621.  @Slightlylyons1  "Don't start none, won't be none." - probably not really Capt. Patrick Ferguson
    6
  622.  @nosuchthingasshould4175  I still worry that "so far" is the operative phrase there, but that is a fair point. Deterrence doctrine is still an absurd and dangerous concept, I maintain, but it does balance the "terrible enough weapons will end war" idea against the fact that the people who start wars usually don't intend to die themselves. We've been lucky so far in that we haven't run into the exception case to that.
    6
  623. Imagine rocking up to a commercial indoor range with one of these. Carry the crate in, put it down, and start methodically setting up the gun on the little table at the front of your lane. You'd have to play it absolutely cool, like there was nothing in any way unusual about what you were doing.
    6
  624. I know it's a typo, but now I'm enjoying the mental image of the bass knuckle, the world's most popular fish-based self-defense device.
    6
  625. I would kind of assume that if anything had gone that wrong during filming, rather than Ian dropping the video on us cold, we'd have gotten something kind of like that one InRange video from a couple of years ago, where he and Karl sit around and talk about first-aid kits after Ian got wounded by... I forget the details, an exploding somethingorother. ("That's... actually quite a lot of blood!")
    6
  626.  @elund408  Cooper aside, one comes to realize after a month or three that once you've read one issue of one American gun magazine, you have effectively read all issues of all American gun magazines. Subscribing is therefore not really necessary. Just reread the one you have on a particular day each month. You'll get the same effect for less money. :)
    6
  627. It's true! The person who gets your eyes after you crash will enjoy life more as well, so it's a win all the way around.
    6
  628. Well, that'll be https://youtu.be/P4ULyMeh3bw
    6
  629.  @aaronorr5586  I have to admit none of the YouTubers I follow has tried to sell me tools for gentleman gardening as yet, although I wouldn't entirely rule out Tyler Hoover trying it at some point.
    6
  630.  @scum07k  See also: those machines that make souvenir stampings out of low-value coins (usually US pennies).
    6
  631. Off the top of my head, Smith-Corona repeatedly went bankrupt and the name is now used by a company that makes label makers, the part of Remington that made typewriters eventually became part of Unisys, and Underwood was bought out by the Italian typewriter maufacturer Olivetti, which still makes other kinds of office machinery.
    6
  632. I think my favorite thing about this particular bunch is the one with serial numbers on the frame and slide that don't match. Numbers-not-matching guns are far from rare, but those are usually guns that saw serial productrion. Besides, they're only one apart. It suggests that the maker didn't really care what the numbers meant and just made them sequential for fun, or possibly thought they were part/assembly numbers or something. :)
    6
  633. Narrowly edging out Tom Ford on Fifth Gear describing the Bangle-era BMW 7 series as looking like it was created by "gibbons with access to welding equipment".
    6
  634.  @Ag3nt0fCha0s  "Weird flex but OK," as I believe the young persons say these days.
    6
  635.  @thomasmorgan1433  Well, your man would. This kind of gun wasn't for men who loaded their own guns. :)
    6
  636. Whac-a-Drone is a sadly underrated game.
    6
  637. Chris can't handle chemicals, though.
    6
  638. Klobb forever.
    6
  639. Here's something fun: in Rare's next N64 shooter, Perfect Dark, the Skorpion At Home is named "KLO1313". It works better in the game's on-screen font than YouTube's. :)
    6
  640.  @S7eveThePira7e  No, one of the later swing-out clones. I can't blame the place I got it from too much for not recognizing it--the markings do look like Mystery Pistol gibberish, particularly since the kerning is horrific and they didn't even spell their own name right. I mean, if you didn't already know about WWI-era Basque gunsmiths from C&Rsenal, what could "TROCAOLAARAMZABALYCIAEIBARESPANA" possibly mean? :)
    6
  641.  @stephenwoods4118  He might have raised that point before literally the day after a different rifle was adopted following years of trials. I'm just putting it out there.
    6
  642. I had one of those too--my mother gave it to me sometime in the late '70s, when I was in early grade school. I used to narrate my plastic army men's battles. Mom claims she still has the tapes and occasionally threatens me with the fatal levels of cringe I would experience if I ever heard them today. :)
    6
  643. "And now, a public service announcement. Don't feed the yao guai. That is all."
    6
  644. From beside the machine.
    6
  645. I'm flashing back to the old Top Gear news segment where they showed one being delivered in Russia, vaguely tied down on the back of one of those industrial flatbed trucks with the built-in crane. :)
    6
  646. It also made me think of the scene in the 1964 film version of Fail-Safe where the President's telephone line to Moscow goes dead in a scream of feedback.
    6
  647.  @werwolf6746  I remember reading about a guy who tried to build his own reactor in his garage or some similar insanity, years ago. He tried to get the fuel for it by scrapping smoke detectors. A lot of smoke detectors. Unfortunately(?), it's not the right kind of radioactive material, so that was never going to work, but he did manage to contaminate everything in the vicinity.
    6
  648.  @ThatOpalGuy  On the contrary, hubris appears to have been one of the late Mr. Rush's defining qualities. I think you may have meant "humility".
    6
  649. The real train wreck was the friends we made along the way. Wait, no.
    6
  650. Oh hey, my grandmother had one of these. It was the last in a long series of typewriters she had throughout her life. I might have it in my basement right now, in fact. I remember thinking it was pretty cool at the time, and it was a great sort of psychological bridge to the power of word processing for someone who had spent the previous 40+ years as a conventional typist. Switching straight from an electric typewriter to a PC would have been beyond the level of patience she had for technological change, but going from the Selectric to this to a PC worked.
    6
  651.  @Callsign_Jaeger  In a vacuum.
    6
  652. Here in Maine, certain classes of vehicle, including school buses and other vehicles hauling hazardous cargo, are required by law to stop at all railroad crossings, regardless of the condition of any warning equipment (lights, gates, etc.) that might be present. This is occasionally deeply annoying where I live, since the main road out of town is crossed by a rail line that hasn't been used in years but has never been officially decommissioned, and it's frustrating to get held up because the bus ahead of you has to stop at an obviously abandoned crossing. That's on whoever owns that line for never bothering to close it properly, though.
    6
  653. Bears.
    6
  654. The Babylon 5 font is an interesting choice, too.
    6
  655.  @ArthurHerbst  ITYM Zip™ Operator™.
    6
  656. Could be worse, it could be long recoil. (Hello, Frommer Stop!)
    6
  657. I love how this thing was already '80s cyberpunk levels of sinister, and yet people still made up physically impossible things to claim it could do to make it more sinister.
    6
  658.  @ItWasSaucerShaped  "rottweilers were originally bred as actual war dogs. and yet do rotties have the reputation that bullies do for aggression?" Uh... yes? Yes they do. The rest of your points are decent, but that one kinda undermines your case. Rottweilers absolutely do inspire the same sort of "moral panic" response as bulls in many places. Wasn't that long ago that ownership of them was regulated in my state. (Although I have to note that every one I've ever met in person was part clown and part throw rug. :)
    6
  659.  @christopherreed4723  As an occult theory, this feels similar to the way the KV-2's absurdly inaccurate gun hits everything you shoot it at in World of Tanks, because of the intervention of the Undead Hand of Stalin.
    6
  660. Mm. With vintage firearms, it's much more about how worn they are than how old. Or, to paraphrase Indiana Jones, it's not the years, it's the mileage. :)
    6
  661.  @beetnoot  I'm going to guess it was James Mahaffey's Atomic Accidents. (Even if it wasn't, it could've been. That book is about more than just criticality accidents, but it does have a long chapter about them.)
    6
  662. I love that on the Cuban gun, it looks like someone took it on himself to hand-scribe "HOLLAND" below the factory mark for "Nederland", in case anyone couldn't figure out where Nederland is. (I know, I know, Dutch people, Holland is only part of the Netherlands, but even so...)
    6
  663. Maybe the batteries should be shipped separately, like the way early A-bombs were delivered to the bombers without the plutonium cores in them. (True story! Part of the weaponeer's job used to be installing that bit in flight. That must have been just about the most puckerful job in the Air Force...)
    6
  664.  @timpascoe3109  My brain automatically parsed VCP as "video cassette player", and I have to say that seems like a disproportionate reaction to discovering a bootleg videotape operation, even during the Troubles.
    6
  665.  @Gameprojordan  This assumes that the M231 Firing Port Weapon accomplishes any goal, which, by all accounts I've seen, is... arguable at best. :)
    6
  666. To paraphrase Mark Novak, nothing can ever be made sailor-proof; things can only be made more or less sailor-resistant at varying levels of cost. The same is true of soldiers. :)
    6
  667. "There's little room in Tupolev's heart for anyone but Tupolev."
    6
  668. Conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all zombie torsos are created equal.
    6
  669.  @andrewallen9993  That's... not an assassination, though, that's getting killed in a battle.
    6
  670. I remember seeing once (I think it's in the Seconds From Disaster episode about the collapse) that in the wake of this disaster, the South Korean government commissioned a survey of all the large buildings in Seoul that were built during the same construction boom. IIRC, the inspectors found to their horror that pretty much all of them were built as shoddily as this place, and that the people responsible for enforcing the building code were taking payoffs left and right to pass them. Many heads rolled, but not as publicly as the Lees'.
    6
  671. +Jaimy van der Horst One potential difficulty is that camming the cylinder forward firmly enough to make a useful gas seal requires considerable mechanical force, which has to come from somewhere, and the only obvious somewhere is the operator's finger. This is a significant contributor to, for instance, the Nagant 1895's appalling 200-million-ton trigger pull. A designer could probably get around that in a revolving longarm with some sort of lever system, but at that point, why would you not just make a lever-action rifle? (shrug) As is so often the case in engineering, the ways in which Nobody Does That Anymore usually got that way because the other ways are better. :)
    5
  672.  @zdub8438  (shrug) Communists or otherwise, they worked for the government. By that measure, John Garand didn't get rich either.
    5
  673. Interesting. It looks like that grip configuration, and the general idea of a slightly more compact and wieldy model, eventually evolved into the "Bolo" variant - though of course Bolos have the normal safety from the grown-up version, not that cockamamie arrangement.
    5
  674. +No One Important It's not a question of my wanting to admit anything; the sudden disarray at the top of Remington was obviously the cause of Browning's trip to shop his long recoil patents in Europe. I just think it's generally a bit tacky to regard a man's untimely death as "fortunate".
    5
  675. "Try to get over your self-righteousness" may be the most self-righteous thing a person can say to another. You realize this. :)
    5
  676. Ah, the Internet.
    5
  677. Even had the Pedersen device turned out not to be the wonder weapon it was hyped to be (which is very probable), the whole project still would have made a lot more sense if the Army had ever actually used them, instead of making hundreds of thousands of them, keeping them unissued in a warehouse for a few years, and then melting them all down for scrap. Which is what they actually did. (Hell, just taking the production cost and burning it would have been more economically efficient than that--less overhead. :)
    5
  678. In 1917, people still thought radioactivity was good for you. You could buy sports tonics with radium in them back then (the death of Eben Byers, a famous socialite and golfer, in 1932 prompted The Wall Street Journal to publish an article with the immortal headline "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off"), and being buried in radioactive sand for a few hours was thought to be a healthful therapy for conditions like rheumatism. A brand of toothpaste that had thorium in it was available in Germany until the end of World War II.
    5
  679.  @BDNeon  Caliber, yes--exact chambering, no. There are a lot of cartridges that use the same diameter bullet, or close enough. For example, say you mike a mystery gun's bore and it's within a few percentage points of nine millimeters (or 0.36 inch, if you're working in US units). That could be 9mm Parabellum, sure, but it could also be 9mm Largo, or 9mm Steyr, or 9mm Glisenti, or 9mm Ultra, or .380 ACP (aka 9mm Short), or .38 ACP (which is not the same thing as .380 ACP). or .38 S&W, or .38 Special, or .357 Magnum, or... well, you get the idea. Granted, some of those are going to be more likely than others depending on the type of gun--a semiauto, for instance, is unlikely to be chambered for .357 Magnum, although it has been done, and practically nobody ever used 9mm Ultra besides a handful of West German police--but even so, bore diameter usually can't tell you enough to make a safe assumption all by itself.
    5
  680. I particularly love the drywall screws on the grips. That's a quality touch. DID YOU KNOW: The good folk of Morton Grove were so embarrassed by this pistol, they banned handguns in their town. (Well, OK, it probably wasn't because of the P18. They did have a handgun ban, though.)
    5
  681. Late to the party, just wanted to note that it's Mechanic Falls, Maine, not Mechanicsburg. (Named for the falls on the Little Androscoggin River, on which the mill that was the original reason for the town was built.) Maine has an oddly rich history of peculiar tinkerers coming up with novel and interesting ways of doing things that were ultimately unsuccessful in the marketplace. The Stanley brothers and their steam-powered cars come to mind. Oh, and a chap called Hiram Maxim, but he did rather better than most on the marketplace side of things, possibly because he'd had the sense to decamp to Europe first. ("Never mind your electrical gadgets, Maxim--if you want to get rich, invent something that enables these Europeans to slaughter each other more efficiently," or words to that effect. :)
    5
  682. Heck, rimmed cartridges barely work in single stack magazines.
    5
  683. mglmouser My favorite example of this phenomenon, just for the "huh?" factor, was a restaurant near where I used to live in California that had a sign proudly announcing that it was called "KIRIN: Cuisine de Northern China". (The restaurant still exists, but its website and Google Street View both show that the tagline is now "cuisine of Northern China". I'm slightly disappointed that they fixed that. It's a bit less charmingly daft now. :)
    5
  684. Here's a slightly mindbending experience: Read "All Quiet", and follow it up immediately with Ernst Jünger's "Storm of Steel". Now there were two men who came away with markedly different takes on outwardly similar experiences... (Although, interestingly, both furiously resented later efforts to politicize their works, particularly by the Third Reich.)
    5
  685. I knew it reminded me of something, and this comment made me think of what it was. In the original pilot for Star Trek (the one with Jeffrey Hunter), the writers hadn't invented the phaser yet, and the Starfleet crewmen's sidearms were laser pistols--the props for which were made out of, I kid you not, typewriter parts. http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/gallery/artoftrek/wahchang-laser.jpg The bolt from this gun is basically that, except from the Badass Dimension. :)
    5
  686. I'm sure the Abwehr in the Netherlands enjoyed these very much, given that they were running the entire SOE network in that country by around mid-1942...
    5
  687. Super Street Fighter II Turbo Hyper Fighting Champion Edition: The Final Challengers
    5
  688. "Do you see MANPADS?"
    5
  689. When I was in high school, my old Tandy PC's built-in speaker occasionally used to pick up the local AM station, the transmitter of which was on a hill not far from my house. I first noticed it one quiet Saturday afternoon when no one else was home, and it creeped me out until I recognized the rhythms of the faint voice I was hearing and realized it was the play-by-play of a baseball game. Then it creeped me out even more. Baseball ghosts are the worst kind. :)
    5
  690. Even considering the shortcomings of human nature, it seems a bit strange how often "maybe we should be extra-careful about running a train inside a chimney" has to be relearned.
    5
  691. Don't bother with bunker oil, it's so viscous you'd have to steam heat it to around the boiling point of water before you could apply it. That's quite expensive and requires a lot of extra physical plant your house probably doesn't have (and would also probably kill you). However, home heating oil and diesel are basically the same thing, so you should be fine with either one!* * don't do this
    5
  692. Is this like how you're not supposed to run a microwave without any food in it? :)
    5
  693. Makes me think of that one James Bond movie where he's reconnoitering a black market arms bazaar and comes across some old Soviet nuclear torpedoes or the like. Back at headquarters, watching the video feed, the RN officer in charge of the operation turns to his Russian counterpart and demands furiously, "Can't you people keep anything locked up?!"
    5
  694. This reminded me of the old commercial for... was it insurance? See, I like commercials that fail as advertising because they let me forget what they were trying to sell me, but are so entertaining as tiny films that I remember the actual content forever. Anyway, this one involved a guy in a tract house trying to figure out what the Mystery Switch in his garage did, unaware that he was causing his next door neighbors' garage door to repeatedly crush their car.
    5
  695. That, or some U-Boat captain is standing by his partly dismantled periscope and demanding of his executive officer, "Hans, wo ist mein Okular?!"
    5
  696. Lacking evidence to the contrary, I choose to believe that Alec just passive-aggressively called out his father on stepladder safety. Because if I had a YouTube channel, that's totally what I would do, except in my case it would be about that museum piece of a floor jack someone refuses to replace in his garage.
    5
  697. I'm having a hard time thinking of a travel method that isn't classier than riding Greyhound. Renting an ox cart, maybe, but it'd have to be a really sketchy ox.
    5
  698.  @jebeda  After some field testing, I can report that if you prop the left side of your laptop up by the thickness of three stacked popsicle sticks, the problem is solved. :)
    5
  699. My parents took me to that film when I was just little, thinking it was a lighthearted comedy about teenage hacker hijinks. That opening scene haunted me for... some time. "Sir, we are at launch, TURN YOUR KEY"
    5
  700. The one covered on Connections was the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965, which affected a much larger geographic area, but didn't last as long (~13 hours in most places).
    5
  701. The guys who were stranded in that one observation bunker that was intended to be just outside the danger radius, in particular, had a pretty bad afternoon, although I don't think any of them suffered any long-term harm.
    5
  702. Ah, the Lamborghini marketing strategy. Leave a bunch of stuff off, label it "Superleggera", sell it for more. :)
    5
  703.  @denthdeath1  Same! I hope one of the versions of the cover is in Russian. I can't read Russian, so not the interior text, but having it on the cover would look cool on the shelf. :)
    5
  704.  @AnimeSunglasses  In the Hi-Power's case, the rationale was that the French Army demanded one be included before the gun could be considered for adoption. And then they didn't adopt it. Thanks, guys. Anyway, it's supposed to prevent you from accidentally shooting yourself, or someone else, by pulling the magazine but forgetting to clear the chamber. Evidently this was a problem in the French Army, or at least their procurement people thought it was.
    5
  705. This is similar to Hosenfröhlichkeit, or cheerfulness in one's pants.
    5
  706. Preach it, we were country when country wasn't cool. Every time I see a post about Social Isolation, it feels like the early '90s, when the flannel-shirts-and-jeans look came in and suddenly the cool kids were dressing like I already did. :)
    5
  707. Maybe he's like Dick Clark. Dick Clark didn't visibly age for like 50 years, and then aged all 50 of them in about 20 seconds, like the guy who drank from the wrong Grail in Last Crusade.
    5
  708.  @dragomilosevic4823  I suspect that's just a coincidence - Doom is set on Mars, where there are both a crater and a mountain range called Erebus (named after the same exploration vessel as the Antarctic mountain).
    5
  709.  @shawnr771  I know, I was being facetious. Forgot the smiley, sorry. I'll go add it for the record. That said, I doubt the sort of marksmanship tradition you're talking about translated very well to large-frame semiautomatic handguns, which very few of those guys had probably even seen before they got to Basic.
    5
  710. This reinforces a long-held value of mine: Never go outside if you can avoid it, and if you can't, make sure you're out there for the absolute least amount of time required.
    5
  711. As opposed to, say, Shackleton's men from the Endurance expedition, who survived a months-long ordeal in Antarctica, then finally made it back to England just in time to be turned straight around and hurled into the meat grinder.
    5
  712.  @Zestric  The public works department in my hometown in Maine has an even more terrifying snow removal tool. Instead of an auger like a giant home snowthrower (which I've seen on state highway trucks), it's basically a huge fan on the front of a wheel loader, where the bucket would normally be. Seeing that thing in your rear-view mirror in traffic, the blade slowly turning, is a really disconcerting experience. They use it to chew up the banks thrown up by the snowplows and throw them into dump trucks for removal to the town snow dump, so that the roads don't get progressively narrower over the course of the winter, like they used to when I was a kid.
    5
  713. It has the same vibe to it as figuring out how to do something in a video game that the game isn't programmed to let you do. "What if I put it in a chest and take the CHEST through the door? Aha!"
    5
  714. (CRASH) "Mais ouiiiii!"
    5
  715. I love that whoever designed the Albanian rifle's upper hand guard literally just took the design of the Chinese one and stretched it. Same three slots, same proportion of those slots to the overall length, just everything is longer on that one axis.
    5
  716. Well, my hatred of SUVs and I are depressed now.
    5
  717.  @pratyushojha  I wasn't allowed to use that one in print, but it's one of the ones that have stayed with me for all the years since.
    5
  718. Sort of a variation on Jay Leno's running joke about how the ash trays in '60s cars are big enough to hold one ash. :)
    5
  719. Just like Naronic, only... bigger.
    5
  720. Sounds like it left quite an impression on the older hunter too. Heyoooooo ... sorry, I'll... I'll wait in the car
    5
  721. Henry Arnold, the One Guy in Charge (commanding general) of the US Army Air Forces during World War II, had four heart attacks between 1943 and 1945. Appropriately enough, one of the reasons for same was that he had to deal with Admiral Ernest King of the Navy on a fairly regular basis. :)
    5
  722.  @DJDocsVideos  In much of the forner Soviet Union, every revolver is a Nagant.
    5
  723. The Mauser HSc (parallel-universe Walther PP) does that "magazine insertion closes the slide" thing on purpose, too. They're pretty odd little guns.
    5
  724. My family never used these when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, but I am just barely old enough* to remember when regular Christmas tree light bulbs were like the ones I assume are buried in these things, with the little screw fittings, like the ones you used to find in nightlights. Ours were colored by being painted on the outside (the oldest ones with solid paints, not transparent), and got so hot you'd lose your fingerprints if you touched them. Good times. Good times. * Either that, or my parents were just so cheap that they hadn't replaced their terrifying Christmas lights with more modern ones by the time I was old enough to remember them. We only stopped using them and bought fairy lights when we got our first artificial tree in about 1985, and the old bulbs started melting the fake needles. Between that and the state of the art in electrical kitchen appliances in the '70s, how we didn't all die in a fire is beyond me. :)
    5
  725. To me, that's the saddest thing about life with dogs--that they don't know they're old, don't know what "old" even is.
    5
  726. Is it just me, or do all the names of these rifles sound like DLCs for a tactical game? Accuracy International: Arctic Warfare, in particular, sounds like one I'd have played.
    5
  727. "Broke into the wrong god damn rec room, didn't you, you bastard!"
    5
  728. Mm. I was born, raised, and still live in the central highlands of Maine, and I know basically nothing about any of that stuff. It's just not my scene. Just because people happen to live near the woods doesn't mean they're necessarily prepared to go into them (or even interested in doing so).
    5
  729. The Chevy dealership in my little town still belongs to the same family that's had it for generations (I went to school with one of the brothers who run it now, back when the man in charge was their father). I haven't been so crass as to ask them, but I reckon they must be holding on by their fingernails, here in this tiny market that's been in the economic dumps for decades now. (Especially since they had their other high-volume marque, Pontiac, cut out from under them.)
    5
  730.  @Verthias  Not only is it heavy, I found the one I handled to be startlingly awkward. The length of pull seems to be optimized for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and that front handgrip is nowhere near as nice to hold onto as it looks like it should be. A definite "never meet your heroes" moment. :/
    5
  731. Outstanding. I would have enjoyed the book very much as originally pitched, but more historical content is always better as far as I'm concerned, and I should think it will help broaden the book's appeal post-release, as well. Launching a specialty publishing house dedicated to high-quality productions must have felt like a huge gamble at the time. It's great to see it paying off. As for General Zhang, the fact that the Japanese assassinated him certainly doesn't preclude the idea that he was collaborating with them. The Imperial Japanese Army, and the Kwantung Army in particular, was... let's go with not renowned for tolerating failure in its own officers, let alone local minions. The Kwantung was the most vicious branch of the IJA, and that is saying something.
    5
  732.  @ScottKenny1978  In a similar vein, US Special Forces were using semi-privately procured AR-15s in Vietnam long before it became the M16.
    5
  733. @DanielCook The latter of which, according to my great-uncle who lives there, is also not really a change.
    5
  734. On top of everything else, I'd just like to note that based on the photo at 8:24, the "proper" carrying case for the apparatus appears, in itself, to be nothing more than the kind of can U.S. Army .30-caliber rifle ammunition comes in, but it has been spray-painted black for extra radiation containment, so that should be fine. Oh, and the lid appears to be missing, but, you know. You can't be too picky about this stuff.
    5
  735. vaguely amazed that it's been two days and no one said "Ian and Rock Island" yet.
    5
  736.  @georger64  I once lived in an apartment that had one of the original Radaranges (the permanently installed ones). It didn't work very well, but the controls made me feel like I was launching a nuclear missile from a submarine, so all was forgiven. :)
    5
  737.  @rootsmanuva82  Marketing people in the automobile industry have an actual technical term for that experience (discovering a cool feature of a car that you didn't know about before you bought it): "surprise and delight". I kid you not.
    5
  738.  @oldmanuserphan  That is also a great band name.
    5
  739. To be fair, the ignition switch problem could be mitigated by the driver's own actions--it was far less likely to happen if people didn't insist on hanging a bunch of other keys, can of Mace, bottle opener, Motorola Razr, Moomin Troll, etc. etc. on the same ring as their ignition keys. Fragmentation anti-personnel airbags, on the other hand... not much to be done about that from the driver's end.
    5
  740.  @neilkurzman4907  I know it was a defective design. However, it could be worked around to an extent, unlike an airbag grenade. (Source: My 2004 Grand Prix, which had one of those switches and, in the 200,000 or so miles before it was replaced, never once killed me.)
    5
  741. It occurs to me that the up/down thing makes perfect sense if you think of the railway as a river, and wherever the company headquarters is (in this case London) as its headwaters. Given that early English railways were direct competitors to, and in many cases seeking to replace, waterway transport, I wonder whether that's where the convention comes from.
    5
  742.  @endoresu  Because it would cost a dang fortune, that's why not. When I was a kid in the '70s, my parents built a house my dad designed to be heated with electricity. During our first winter there, the price of electricity just about doubled, and it's never come down since. Dad put in a wood stove and thenceforth we were only ever allowed to turn on the electric register in the bathroom.
    5
  743. A man would have to be a bona fide ZiP™ Operator™ to control a weapon like that.
    5
  744. "DC" might stand for Douglas County. There are a lot of unincorporated towns in Nevada, and I don't know offhand how the ATF handles markings for manufacturers that are located in places like that. It's plausible that they could fall back to the next lowest level of organized government, which would be the county (as that's who's probably doing the law enforcement).
    5
  745. I can, because I've seen the C&Rsenal videos about Pershing and Crozier rejecting the Lewis gun. :)
    5
  746. "Believe it or not, underneath all of this... stuff... this is just an AR-15 rifle, similar to the ones used by the U.S. military from the 1960s through until about 2120."
    5
  747. Well, I haven't been in a darkroom in probably 35 years, but as soon as you got out the bottle of stop bath, all the smells came back to me...
    5
  748. Indeed, and it only got worse in the early 20th century--hence the series of naval arms limitations treaties in the 1920s and '30s, which were in part a desperate attempt to slow down the pace of ship construction before it bankrupted all the major world powers (but particularly the UK, thanks to the Admiralty's insistence that the Royal Navy be so constituted that it could defeat any two of its expected enemies at once).
    5
  749.  @BloodwyrmWildheart  Only in this wretched decade could someone perceive the appreciation of irony as a disorder.
    5
  750.  @AmityPost  Most SI units are named after scientists, that's just how the system's naming convention works (the exceptions are older, inherited names like those of the metre, second, and mole). Thus, the SI base unit of temperature is the kelvin (after the 19th-century physicist William Thomson, Baron Kelvin), not the degree, even though it does have the same magnitude as the degree Celsius. (Also, omitting "degree" indicates to people in a position to care that a kelvin temperature is absolute, i.e., not relative to any arbitrary scale, unlike degrees Fahrehnheit and Celsius, but that's only genuinely useful information in a very small number of cases.)
    5
  751. I agree! I'd love to hear John's take on the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, for instance.
    5
  752. "Dickey, who was hugely remorseful for his actions, escaped prison." Er... perhaps avoided prison. "Escaped prison" means something a little more... dramatic.
    5
  753. @A real bisexual petrol-head "Cheap" as in not expensive. It wasn't an aesthetic value judgment, for Christ's sake.
    5
  754. Presumably these are the same folks who refused to buy letterboxed VHS tapes because, and I quote (inexactly, it was a long time ago that I had this argument), "They're ripping you off, you're not getting all of the picture."
    5
  755. And if it had been running early (which, well, when has a train ever done that? but anyway), the bridge would still have been there.
    5
  756. IIRC, the original proposal for the airliner version extended the upper deck to the full length of the fuselage, but at the time no one was sure how an emergency evacuation of that many passengers could be accomplished in a reasonable length of time, so they scaled it back a bit.
    5
  757. For just a second, I thought the part after "Colorado" was going to be "I'll give you a tour of my salt mine." :)
    5
  758. "Bag, tea, pre-measured, Mk VII*", surely.
    5
  759. The shape of the glass on that lamp makes me want to do something really silly with it, like put a novelty plastic mad science brain inside it.
    5
  760. If someone had showed me the picture of the crewmen forming up in their spotless new turnout gear without any context, I would have assumed it was a publicity photo provided by the company that made their equipment, not a picture of people whose actual ship was in the actual process of being on fire. Elvis almighty.
    5
  761. Iä! Iä! McCollumfhtagn!
    5
  762. The OG Green Goblin was absurd-looking on purpose; the whole idea was that the readers (and Spidey) would have a hard time taking him seriously until he started doing genuine mayhem. The contrast was meant to enhance the shock value of his capacity for violence.
    5
  763. So that they know up front that they have nothing to worry about? :)
    4
  764. I rode herd on a student machine tool lab for too long. I watch this and the OK-kids-it's-time-to-clean-up-the-lab voice in the back of my head keeps going, "Adam. Adam! Turn off the DRO on the Bridgeport when you're not using it!" :)
    4
  765.  @zdub8438  I don't know about Simonov, but Kalashnikov was a national hero in the USSR (and post-Soviet Russia) until the day he died. He wasn't rich in the Western sense, but by the standards of his country and his times he was very well-looked-after.
    4
  766. ***** Not entirely: Bluing = black iron oxide (magnetite) = Fe3O4; browning = red iron oxide (rust) = Fe2O3.  The latter doesn't get that extra spike of temperature necessary to convert the rust to magnetite, which is why I thought my PHP was browned; they were, after all, not made with what we might call state-of-the-art equipment. That said, I don't doubt that magnetite can also be brown, under certain conditions.  I just hadn't realized it before.
    4
  767.  @nickp1370  "I'm not saying it was the Austrians, but... it was the Austrians."
    4
  768. In re snow removal: the gel fuel in miltary flamethrowers would probably make too much of a mess to be useful. As for the general idea of applying direct flame, it doesn't really help in and of itself. It does melt the snow, but no portable flame source I know of is hot enough for long enough to boil off most of the resulting water, which then re-freezes as a smooth layer of glare ice. Not a net improvement. Uh... or so I've been told. ;)
    4
  769. Man, did Søren Bang have the greatest name for a firearms designer or what?
    4
  770. I think you'll find that violence is still the violence of our times.
    4
  771. +Mark Coffman This came up in the comments to another video; ISTR Ian noting that the auction houses prefer having to wipe off a few fingerprints over the increased possibility of something valuable getting fumbled and dropped by gloved hands. Besides, Keith carried the thing every day for 30 years; being handled a bit by a few folks at an auction house isn't going to hurt it. It's a handgun, after all, not precision optics or something. :)
    4
  772. +Carl Napp Or, well, "Valter", since it starts with a W.
    4
  773. T4nkc0mm4nd3r Well, the people who wore them didn't have many problems. The people who made them, on the other hand...
    4
  774.  @hanfpeter2822  Ah, I see.
    4
  775. When I was in high school, my dad bought a 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge that turned out to be a counterfeit built on a regular '60 GTO. Same kind of thing. As an aside, semi-relevant to the original video topic, I recently "de-sporterized" an '03 Springfield deer rifle back to the original M1903A3 spec, more or less just to do it. It's not meant to fool anyone into thinking it's original, I used a very obviously new stock from the CMP, but it seems to have more dignity that way. :)
    4
  776. Sure, heck, they kept making 03A3 and 03A4 rifles well into the war. My 03A3 was made in April of 1942. My grandfather acquired it sometime in the '50s, when he was a member of the Army Reserve rifle team. I think they were shooting Garands in competition by then, but they still had Springfields around even then.
    4
  777. It also happened to be a codename for a very high Allied security clearance level during WWII. Personnel with BIGOT clearance were said to be "bigoted". Probably at least a little convergence there.
    4
  778. +Exploatores Note the sign behind Ian advertising that part of this auction is, in fact, specifically a collection of Confederate revolvers.
    4
  779. Hmm, I just noticed there's something distinctly 1907 Roth-Krnka-y about the grip on this particular model. Was that shape just fashionable at the time, I wonder, or was someone copying someone's homework? :) (I have no problem with that either way, I wish all handgun grips were like my Roth's. By far the comfiest pistol handle I know of.)
    4
  780. Maybe they just don't like the Coxster. Or Doug. Or YouTube. People thumbs-down videos without watching them for all kinds of nutty reasons.
    4
  781. I'm obscurely sad that I seem to be the only person here who recognized the M.A.S.K. reference.
    4
  782. Luke DS You set the slidey gadget to the nearest setting to the distance away you reckon your target is (e.g., if the target is 200 or so meters away, and your tangent sight is calibrated in meters, you set your tangent sight to 200).  The farther away the target is, the higher the rear sight notch is, which forces you to raise the muzzle in order to maintain your sight picture.  If you get the range right and the sight is set up correctly, it compensates for bullet drop at long ranges.  (This is why the random numbers on the fake ones are so funny.) Many tangent sights are hilariously optimistic, even the genuine ones.  Sort of like car speedometers.  My old Pontiac couldn't really do 150 miles an hour, and I doubt my Mosin-Nagant M44 carbine can really hit a man-sized target accurately from a kilometer away.  (It certainly can't in my hands; I can't even SEE a man-sized target a kilometer away. :)
    4
  783. "Sam, how do you avoid burning your arm on the flash from the cylinder gap?" "That's the best part, my friend--you don't!"
    4
  784. To be fair, the people who went and fought the fire were almost certainly not the same people who answered the phone. The firefighters themselves can't be expected to know about a fire before they're dispatched.
    4
  785. Or one of those things Japanese teenagers put on their cell phones. :)
    4
  786.  @Pekara121  All cats are a hail of harpoons. :)
    4
  787. OG Selectrics are complicated enough inside that it wouldn't feel entirely implausible to find out that they incorporate Victorian mechanical time travel technology.
    4
  788. John Ficarra's "this can be red' story (which I think he told for a video on the VINwiki channel) is up there. The phrase was said in regard to a rare car he was providing for a photo shoot. IIRC, it took him a minute to realize the art director was passive-aggressively trying to order him to repaint the car, which was obviously never going to happen.
    4
  789. Every day in every way, but on the other hand, man's got to pay the bills.
    4
  790.  @pfadiva  Not of the heist, though. That's the point...
    4
  791.  @lol500000  The Warlord Era isn't the best historical look for their country, but I suppose, given how many Civil War buffs we still have in the US for some reason, that's not really an obstacle.
    4
  792. However that lever disconnect is supposed to work, you'd better hope it DOES work, or it'll rip your fingers off the first time you fire. Call me squeamish, but I think that would make me nervous as a consumer. :)
    4
  793. The shape of that bow fairing reminds me of some much later submarine, but I can't remember which. Maybe some early-Cold-War Soviet boat? That's going to bug me now. Fun fact: USS Albacore (AGSS-569), mentioned in this video, still exists! She's on display in a nice park by Route 1 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, not far from one of the bridges over the Piscataqua into Maine, and just a stone's throw upriver from where she was built. She's still in her final propulsion test configuration, with contra-rotating props compensating for that "stern too narrow for two screws" problem.
    4
  794. The particulars of the lithium-7 miscalculation are worth keeping in mind, too, since the problem perfectly illustrates what happens when very well-educated people get cocky and overlook things. The physicists were asked by a layperson if all that extra lithium wouldn't be a problem, and they scoffed because the poor fool didn't know enough nuclear physics to understand that the excess was a different isotope that wouldn't decay into fusible tritium when it absorbed a neutron like lithium-6 did... ... completely failing to realize that, in the first microsecond or so of the explosion, the primary fission reaction was going to be throwing out such an astronomically dense neutron flux it would cause the lithium-7 to fission (and in the process simultaneously add more tritium to the fusion reaction and throw a ton more neutrons at the uranium tamper). That's three fission reactions for the price of two, plus a bigger fusion yield and more complete fission of the tamper thrown in for free. No wonder the overall yield was triple what was expected. I've seen it suggested that the Soviets ramped back on the Tsar Bomba specifically because of the Castle Bravo fiasco, having realized that if they set it up for what they expected to be 100 Mt and it unexpectedly tripled on them, it might crack open the planet like an egg. (OK, that's probably a dramatic exaggeration, but hey, who the hell knows what an explosion that big might do? A few of the people working on the Manhattan Project were worried that even the Trinity device, which was a firecracker by 1950s standards, might set the entire atmosphere on fire and wipe out all life on Earth.)
    4
  795.  @robertslugg8361  M1/M2 carbine magazines (the 30-round ones) as well. Baseplate pops off, cartridges all over the floor. Especially awkward at an indoor range where you can't just go pick them up...
    4
  796.  @morelenmir  True, although at least that is a less likely modern use case.
    4
  797. The only thing I really disliked about my similarly-shaped '84 Toronado was that the doors could block an entire lane of traffic each when opened all the way. (Well, OK, not really. But it felt that way sometimes. And the '84 model was smaller than the one from the '70s. :)
    4
  798.  @nthgth  They're dated. You can scroll back through the history to see what the block looked like before the explosion, not long after, and several others up to the most recent ones, which were taken this past June.
    4
  799.  @quentintin1  A gun shop near where I live has a B.A.R. training aid from WWII hanging on the wall; not only is it cutaway, it's also 200% scale, I suppose so the GIs at the back of the room can see what's going on. :)
    4
  800. So did the makers of the 007 movies. They _said_it was a PPK on screen, but the prop was a PP, because the PPK is too small to be recognizable in any shot that isn't a close-up. :)
    4
  801. Age-of-sail field repairs were sometimes pretty wild. Look up the practice of "careening" sometime!
    4
  802. I have no joke, I just like saying "self-taught tabby gun-cat".
    4
  803. At least it wasn't the button to degauss the tube that you used to get on the larger CRT computer monitors. Pressing that while touching particular parts of the case in, for instance, certain SGI and DEC monitors--say, while moving them--might get you a fun surprise, and by "fun" I mean "high-voltage".
    4
  804. The way that rifle throws brass reminds me of being at an indoor range three bays down from a guy who had just bought one of those faux H&K rifles that Century Arms does. I still have one of his shell casings, which bounced off the ceiling and landed in my shirt pocket. Even the RSO was impressed.
    4
  805. I had a 1968 Pontiac Tempest in high school; it drove very similarly to the way you describe the 1990 Century experience. It had an enormous 400-cubic-inch V8 in it--the Tempest was the car the GTO evolved out of, after all--but in the four-door Tempest sedan it was a very sleepy 400-cubic-inch V8. One of the things I liked to do was floor the accelerator at the top of an Interstate on-ramp. There would be a palpable pause while the bridge crew telegraphed down to the engine room for full power, the two-speed automatic transmission would gird its loins and drop into Low, and... well, nothing much would happen, really. There would be quite a lot of noise, which gave the pleasant illusion of great speed, but by the merge at the end of the ramp the car would still only be doing about 50 miles per hour. :) (Also, World War II bombers had less body roll in a tight turn, if "tight" is a word that can reasonably be applied to any '68 GM car's turning radius.) I loved that car. Still regret being compelled to sell it after graduation, and that was, oh... a long time ago. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.
    4
  806. "There's fur in my headlights" is a phrase I never expected to encounter, particularly as part of a list of reasons why the speaker can't handle a personal interaction right now, but it does fit the context. I was a passenger in a car that hit a deer when I was a kid, up in the north woods of Maine. Nobody aboard the car was hurt, so the worst part for us was waiting around for a game warden to come and shoot the deer. :/
    4
  807. Operative word there: "feels". :)
    4
  808. "They look Soviet, but no markings, so I guess not."
    4
  809. It may be obscure to much of the rest of the world, but this disaster is still so epochal in the US that it's mentioned in, of all things, an episode of the web series Freeman's Mind (a comedic narration of gameplay from Half-Life, you can find it here on YouTube). Freeman rants about it after running into a dead end at a locked door that looks like it should be an emergency exit.
    4
  810.  simonjrwinter  ... for at least 20 minutes. :)
    4
  811.  @baylinkdashyt  Oh, it goes back farther than that--it's the original Mercury logo from the 1930s. It was a "retro" touch even on the 1960s versions.
    4
  812. I reckon they ought to be "top outlet, ground on top; bottom outlet, ground on bottom" so that two downward-right-angle plugs can be used without screwing around with adapters. (Or side-by-side with the receptacles rotated 90 degrees, instead of over-and-under so the wires are constantly in each other's way.)
    4
  813. They're designed to survive a lot, but no manufactured object can be made indestructible.
    4
  814. That's basically the Ruger Mk I–IV, except they reworked some of the weaker features (and made the disassembly even worse, until the Mk IV). Bill Ruger's original starting point was a Baby Nambu he'd picked up somewhere.
    4
  815. Agreed; I can't shake the feeling that there's a lot of stuff in there which works great when new, but isn't going to tolerate age and/or wear very well.
    4
  816.  @harrynac6017  As an aside, I must try to remember "my comment was a chaotic novel" for similar situations. It's such a well-turned bit of phrasing. :)
    4
  817. At least he didn't have his thumb up.
    4
  818. +Fred Lee Indeed. Also, if you, for instance, forgot you were in a car that had them, opened the door, and leaned down to pick something up off the ground without letting it run forward first, it would catch you behind the neck and basically fold you in half. Your friends will find this so paralytically amusing that no one will think to hit the emergency belt release in the center console for like 15 seconds,too. Um, not that I was ever dumb enough to do that in a friend's Ford Tempo or anything. No.
    4
  819. Ye gods, there was a terrier in there. That's... horrifying. We really haven't done these animals any favors with some of the traits we've bred them for, have we...
    4
  820. Look, when Comrade Stalin tells you to duplicate the capitalist aircraft, you duplicate the capitalist aircraft. Thinking is for the nomenklatura.
    4
  821. Like a Liberator, which you only use during the tutorial to whack a Nazi train guard and take his MP40.
    4
  822. "Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have not." —Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveller (1898)
    4
  823. I feel kind of bad for Mothman. He's just out there minding his own business, doing mothman things, and people blame him for anything bad that happens within 100 miles, like he had anything to do with it. He's just a giant moth, there's no way he can collapse a bridge. He has a hard enough time with the laws of aerodynamics. Condolences for your loss. They leave us much too soon, and in another sense they never leave. My last dog departed the same year yours arrived, and I still think of him every day.
    4
  824. The thing about forests is, they grow back--faster than most folks expect, depending on the predominant tree species.
    4
  825.  @doublebassman123  To be fair, adventurers and NPCs significant enough to have names in AD&D are highly exceptional individuals. Most "ordinary" people in the game setting have two, three HP max.
    4
  826. The approximate equivalent here in Maine is "I shoulda bought it when I saw it at Marden's!"
    4
  827. "You see, Ivan..." (Yeah, sure, they're Italian. Wink wink.)
    4
  828. "What was the point of going to Portugal to pick up this signal?" commenters ask. Clearly, the point was to demonstrate to other agents that yes, don't worry, you can go on holiday to Portugal and still pick up your instructions from the Center. :)
    4
  829. To be fair to Con Edison (there's a phrase you won't see very often), NYC in the summer of 1977 was just waiting for an excuse to explode. If it hadn't been a power outage, it could just as easily have been a heat wave, or a garbagemen's strike, or the Mets winning two games in a row...
    4
  830. It's OK, it's just the LM cabin repress valve. Perfectly harmless.
    4
  831. Speaking as someone who is waiting out a disability determination process that began in early January and is currently marked as likely to conclude sometime in August, maybe: Yes, yes they do.
    4
  832. Honestly, there are some Bond films to which both of those things would be indisputable improvements. Maybe not Dr. No, but some of them...
    4
  833.  @JoeSixThreeOh  Gardone was in the part of Italy that made up the so-called "Italian Social Republic" (the Fascist puppet state set up to pseudo-legitimize German occupation of northern Italy after Mussolini was forced out in '43 and the Badoglio government in Rome surrendered to the Allies), so yeah, pretty much. The area didn't fall under Allied control until May of 1945, after both Hitler and Mussolini were dead.
    4
  834. In re the Secret Service's corporate culture: back in the late '80s/early '90s, my high school vice-principal's brother was a Secret Service agent. Somehow he was convinced to come in and give a talk to my senior year American Government class, during which he spent a whole class period not telling us about his job and not answering questions. I didn't mind, because AG was first period and I was never really awake anyway, but I heard tell that there was some grumbling between that class's teacher and the vice-principal in the teachers' lounge that afternoon. :)
    4
  835. I think the eeriest thing about the Vajont Dam is that it's still there. The reservoir is empty, of course, but still, imagine living in Longarone and being able to just look up anytime and see it there, looming over the valley.
    4
  836. On the other hand, I understand they actually work nowadays.
    4
  837.  @M.ds87  I'm curious--what on Earth industrial process calls for vaporized cadmium?!
    4
  838. Oh neat, Ian covered a type I've actually got one of. I have one of the Hämmerli ones. In addition to the fake Zella-Mehlis and "ac" marks on the outside, it has"HÄMMERLI TIENGEN" stamped on the outside of the chamber, where it can only be seen if you take the slide off the gun. Also, a bit oddly, it has wooden grips. I don't know if those were added by Hämmerli, or some previous owner, or what.
    4
  839.  @smithwesson1896  And Legionnaires.
    4
  840. The Glock-style rear sight doesn't bother me. What bothers me is, all of that exquisite precision manufactured and beautiful finish work, and then they went with the generic Chintzmaster 5000 computer-controlled electropencil font for the serial number and caliber marking on the barrel. (headshake) Germans.
    4
  841. When the CIA attempted to raise the wreck of the Soviet submarine K-129 in 1974 (Project Azorian), the sub had only been on the bottom for six years, and even then the vessel's structural integrity was hopelessly compromised--in fact, it had been since the moment it struck bottom during the sinking. This is reinforced by the fact that the retrieval tool itself was badly damaged by colliding with the sea floor during the salvage attempt, and unlike the wreck, it wasn't in freefall at the time.
    4
  842. eigrp Dad? Is that you? I didn't know you were on YouTube.
    4
  843. They were probably lined with whatever color the factory had enough of on hand that day.
    4
  844. I have to wonder to what extent this is Ford's response to all the "What the hell, guys? On what planet is this thing compact?!" reactions the new Ranger got.
    4
  845.  @The_sinner_Jim_Whitney  Did you at least win the bet?
    4
  846. "Meanwhile, my handle is spelled 'eadweard', but is pronounced 'Throat-Warbler Mangrove'."
    4
  847. I test drove one once. It was a bit like I imagine driving an office chair on the Interstate would be. I liked it a lot, but the nearest place that could service one was more than a hundred miles from where I live, so I decided to be prudent for once. As with all fits of prudence, I've regretted that one many times.
    4
  848. Heck, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago built a giant exhibit hall for U-505. After that, I have ceased to believe anyone who says that anything can't be put indoors. :)
    4
  849.  @TheAmir259  To keep them straight, remember that the WWI one was the lead ship of the Scharnhorst class, while the WWII one was Scharnhorst class. ... Dammit, Germany!
    4
  850. "Swift Model B: For Training and Tetanus"
    4
  851.  @hernanposnansky4830  I've no way of knowing where in the world you are, so your situation may be different, but just to note: Slide Rule is in print in the US at the moment. 17 bucks in paperback at Amazon. There's also an Audible version, and it's available on Kindle as well.
    4
  852. I think on a strictly practical social level, I'll take the cereals.
    4
  853.  @akranov  Well, hey, he did say "at this point".
    4
  854. "The police response was not optimal" is a... very diplomatic way of putting it.
    4
  855. I was riding to dinner in my friend's '90-something 2-door, many years ago, when some guy riding a stolen Ducati at around 4 million mph crashed into the back of us, trying to split the lane while we were stopped at a traffic signal. He hit the left rear corner. You know... where the spare tire is? I feel bad for the owner of that bike, because he (or she, I suppose) must have gotten what was left of it back in an envelope. (Dude who stole it must have landed 15, 20 yards farther down the road. He probably didn't even find out he was under arrest until sometime the next week.)
    4
  856.  @hippymad1  Fun fact: the Russian postal security service used Nagant M1895s until 2003. (I assume not exclusively, but that's when they were finally withdrawn from service.)
    4
  857. Late '90s Saab keys had a similar feature--even though they had separate keyfob remote controls by then. It didn't work very well, that was back in the days before cheap LEDs, so it was a tiny incandescent bulb that just barely lit up.
    4
  858.  @RingwayManchester  That's a familiar tune! I read recently that when the KGB supplied arms to the IRA back in the '70s, they went to great lengths to ensure that even the gun oil used on them and the cloth they were wrapped in (to say nothing of the guns themselves) were sourced from West Germany, so that if the shipments were intercepted, the Soviet government could not only deny responsibility, but double down and be the first to be shocked, shocked that Bonn was backing the Irish separatist movement. The more things change, etc.
    4
  859.  @davidparker5068  It's true that Chrysler pronounced it wrong, but "Cordoba" was the name of the car those commercials were advertising, not the leather. (Punch line: "Corinthian leather", as advertised in the Cordoba spots, is completely meaningless. Those cars didn't even have full leather upholstery; at best the seats had leather facings with vinyl everything else.)
    4
  860.  @noth606  Our sofa was covered in this incredibly scratchy heavy-gauge burlap in an amazing brown and black tweed pattern. It probably came from Sears, like pretty much everything else in the house. It was so prickly, uncomfortable, and ugly we had to cover it with a bedsheet.
    4
  861. I think it was one of the AMG Black Edition cars that Clarkson once described as having seats that were "one-piece carbon fibre, from the Mercedes-Benz Agony range."
    4
  862. "Well... that was like arresting him." - Atomic Robo
    4
  863. He must've had a lovely time in middle school.
    4
  864. Or an extremely weird Sigue Sigue Sputnik cover band.
    4
  865. I might actually resubscribe to watch The Lincolnshire Poacher. At least the first season, before they killed off all the characters I liked and changed everything around in the finale to be Edgy and Unexpected.
    4
  866. I had to smile seeing those old vertical mills. I recently visited the facility that replaced my university's old Machine Tool Laboratory, where I spent many happy hours working as a tool crib attendant for my undergraduate workstudy gig, and while it's undeniably a much better-equipped and generally more impressive facility, the only things I saw there that made me actually happy to see them were the Bridgeports from the old MTL, transplanted into one corner of the new one's much bigger, shinier tool room. It was like visiting someone's fancy new house and being reassured that they still had the same old dog. :) (The new place may be a soulless corporate-sponsored shopping mall, but it sure does have a lot of cool stuff. Kind of makes me want to go back and finish my MET degree. I jumped ship for the humanities partway through, out of what my father called an unresolved phobia of earning a degree I could actually make money with.)
    4
  867. Conversely, a lot of cheap slow cookers only have LO and HI, no OFF.
    4
  868.  @Archgeek0  The one on my oven is always running; if you don't set it, it just starts up thinking whenever it got power was 12:00. Which can be kind of handy for figuring out how long a power outage lasted, not that that piece of information is actually useful. :)
    4
  869. "Wotta revoltin' development this is." - Benjamin J. Grimm; also this cat
    4
  870. Holy crap. This has one of the hallmarks of all the great(?) radiation accidents in spades: the fact that if you wrote it up as a movie pitch, the producer would never buy it. "So lemme get this straight. The radiation wingus routinely malfunctions such that the guys who work there literally have to break into the room like they're pulling a heist, and nobody's ever bothered to fix it. You got a guy on the roof trying to jury-rig something with compressed air and a frickin' winch. AND the machine was originally made by the same people who made the Therac-25? Get the hell outta my office." (And that's without even looking at the diagram of the box path through the machine, which is like something Gordon Freeman would have had to crawl through in the middle levels of Half-Life while it was still running.) By a weird coincidence, I was eating a pepperoni and extra cheese pizza while watching this. Which may not have been the best plan when we got to the part about vomiting blood, but hey, I knew the risks when I signed up, unlike those poor bastards.
    4
  871.  @bkjeong4302  Lucky Crane, in particular, seems either eerily apt or ironic, depending on whether you reckon a carrier that survives past the effective death of her navy's air arm is charmed or cursed.
    4
  872. This crash has eerie echoes of the 2005 Amagasaki disaster in Japan, albeit on a mercifully smaller scale. In that instance the train was a packed commuter train and the cause was the intense timetable pressure Japanese train drivers are under. The train was running late and the driver appears to have decided to make up time by going balls-to-the-wall on his next segment, which included a curve with a significant speed restriction on it. For bonus bad, on the outside of that curve wasn't an open area like at Croydon, but instead an apartment building's parking garage. That decision worked out about as well as you would expect: 107 dead, hundreds more injured. IIRC it was Japan's worst rail accident since the 1960s.
    4
  873. 6:40 "But we're not here to see any of that."
    4
  874. I have an MP3 player cleaner! Or I guess if you want to be boring you could call it a microfiber cloth. Friggin' touch screens... :)
    4
  875. Well, Admiral Winter has never really been their friend...
    4
  876.  @Ozuhananas  I clicked View Reply hoping to see exactly this. :)
    4
  877. "I told you to lock the garage. Now the neighbor's Honda CR-Z has gotten in here and mated with the Aston. God only knows what the puppies will look like."
    4
  878. Here in my hometown in the US, there was a similar controversy a couple of years ago over the local power company swapping people's old meters for a new model that has wireless communication capabilities. All they do is transmit their findings to a receiver, so that the meter readers can just drive around polling meters from their van instead of having to get out and walk around, entering people's yards, to read each meter in person. For whatever reason, someone decided that this was one radio source too many and launched an extensive, somewhat-better-spelled leaflet campaign against the power company. They weren't even addressing the real, if somewhat niche, privacy concerns (oh no! Bad Actors might hack my "smart meter" and... uh... find out how much electricity I use, I guess)--just blowing a huge cloud of FUD about RF exposure.
    4
  879. You know you're screwed when your new commander, replacing one sacked for incompetence, is Sir Douglas Haig.
    3
  880. All manner of wobblies.
    3
  881. Later surpassed by the High Standard 10B, IMO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H5Z9umFlzk
    3
  882. I remember back in the '80s, Llama used to offer a super-fancy inlaid/engraved version of their 1911 clone; I have no idea how many of them they actually sold, but it appeared in Shooter's Bible at least a couple years running. "Gold Damascening", if memory serves. Bling before bling was a word.
    3
  883. +James Crego The video's from July of 2013. Do pay attention, 007. :)
    3
  884. +John Floyd Easy - they're extremely expensive, and people who don't collect them often don't understand why the hell anyone would want to.
    3
  885. Man, I want to live in the parallel universe where the M1911A1 is a Webley-Fosbery with slightly tweaked ergo.
    3
  886. Uryendel The US evidently disagrees with you on that last point, and it's outside the scope of this video anyway.  As to the first, American shooters often do talk about distances in meters, probably because it's close enough to a yard as to be intuitive (unlike kg/lbs).
    3
  887. In re making history feel alive, I agree with Indy - I find that a great way of making sure my own historical work has a sense of immediacy about it is to think of the past as if it were a place that is elsewhere, rather than a time that is gone. Think of World War I as though it were a hundred years AWAY rather than a hundred years AGO, so to speak. The difference is subtle and I'm finding it difficult to articulate without making it sound like I'm advocating delusional thinking just at the moment, but basically, I find that if I try to think of the people involved in such matters as though they are far away instead of long dead, it helps make it all seem more real somehow.
    3
  888. @Jona v.K https://youtu.be/Z0D6p3w2qgY
    3
  889. I bet the Metropolis PD ones go for a bomb at auction these days.
    3
  890.  @stefanmolnapor910  Ah ah ah ah! </count_von_count>
    3
  891. Confirmed: the Dutch police invented the Lawgiver decades before 2000 AD magazine.
    3
  892. Man, I would blow the NFA vetting for this gun for sure. I would be unable to stop myself from writing "anti-aircraft defense" in the "what in the world do you want it for?" blank on the form, and the ATF hates a smartass.
    3
  893. 9:26 It appears someone was inspired by the Khyber Pass gunsmiths' fondness for decorative 3s. Or maybe this is in fact a cunning Khyber Pass copy of the White prototype. (No, of course I'm not serious. :) Alternately, perhaps this is a really huge auction and the rifle is simply item #3,333,333. :)
    3
  894.  @jakedeforus6779  1945-made Type 94 Nambu.
    3
  895. The Tokarev TT-33 does a similar sort of thing. OTOH, the TT-33 very much does not have a captive recoil spring, which makes getting it to the point where you can replace that easily replaced hammer group a huge pain in the butt. ;)
    3
  896. I'm sure the Garand family finds it very compelling that randos on the Internet think pronouncing their name the way they do "sounds stupid as hell".
    3
  897. I love how discreet Simpson's import markings are, as opposed to the ones that look like they were applied with a hacksaw (looking at you, Century).
    3
  898. Nice job with the moustache wax. That is indeed the authentic Kaiser-style flavor saver.
    3
  899. Whitney's supposedly interchangeable parts were largely a marketing stunt, not to say an outright con - his demonstrations for the government were rigged with parts carefully hand-made and discreetly marked, and not until long after his contract was supposed to have been fulfilled (and long after the weapons would have been of any actual use) did he deliver anything of substance. Harper's Ferry Arsenal deserves most, if not all, of the credit for developing interchangeable-parts arms manufacture in the United States.
    3
  900. +Bikkus Dikkus I'm 68% sure that all those reference to joy were sarcasm. But only 68%, because this is the Internet and there are some sick mammajammas out there.
    3
  901.  @glapou  The French seem to have had a thing for comparing landforms to breasts. There's a range of mountains in the western US that are still called the Tetons after early French explorers' name for them.
    3
  902. Yeah, they're like vegans. No detection required.
    3
  903.  @madjedi2235  Well... that was kind of the point. It's supposed to look like it's from the '60s, if not earlier. It was a retrocar before retrocars were really a thing, which I guess would now make it a retroretrocar. :)
    3
  904. I don't even care about the rest of it, I just want a button marked WARP in my car. (edit: Oh yeah, there it is, 8:05. Douglas, I'm disappointed in you for not noticing that and pointing it out.)
    3
  905. I've seen an engraved crescent wrench. It was made as a joke retirement gift for a machinist.
    3
  906. To be fair, Floridian cars don't need brakes.
    3
  907. Without a doubt.
    3
  908. I have a textbook from a "history of technology" course I took as an undergrad which includes a reprint of my second-favorite magazine advertisement of all time. It's from sometime in the 1910s, I think, and it shows a lady vacuuming a parlor using one of the newfangled electric vacuum cleaners... which is connected to the light socket in the ceiling, because as you note, that was clearly a perfectly reasonable thing to do in those days. :) Anyway, I wish I had switched outlets in this place. Instead, in order to get LAMP to work from somewhere within reach of where I'm likely to find myself in the dark, I have to use those things that are like extension cords, except they don't actually extend the outlet, they just have a switch at the other end of the wire. The house probably needs to be completely rewired, but who the hell has that kind of money? Not me, that's for sure.
    3
  909.  @marthapackard8649  Wow. That's so similar to my own experiences that I'm quite overcome with nostalgia now. My mother worked at our local Woolworth's, but I liked Newberry's better because it had an escalator--which was quite a thing in a town of fewer than 10,000 people!
    3
  910. Amazingly, this accident could have been even worse. In addition to running over several track personnel, the wreck of Macklin's car came within inches of careening into several cars being refueled, and the refueling equipment, in the pits. If that had happened, the resulting fireball would have made Levegh's burning car look like a Cub Scout campfire. There's a school of thought about this incident which holds that Levegh felt his career was at stake--that after disappointing performances in the previous four years' Le Mans races, he was so desperate to make a good showing in 1955 that he pushed too hard and got himself into a situation he couldn't get out of. Juan Manuel Fangio, who was also driving for Mercedes-Benz that year and was right behind Levegh when the accident occurred, insisted for the rest of his life that Levegh made a hand signal warning him of danger just before the crash, and that he (Fangio) only made it through the mess unharmed because he had that split second's worth of advance warning.
    3
  911.  @wingracer1614  I didn't need to click to know which video that was. ... but I did anyway, because who wouldn't?
    3
  912. It's like somebody bought the Millennium Falcon and converted it into an exploration ship.
    3
  913. Personally, I think the worst thing about the Kerningsberg class is their ext r em e ly un e ve n typ o g r a ph y.
    3
  914. Fun fact: They're also how most WWII/Cold War-era air raid sirens work! A lot of the most popular designs had what amounted to two Sirocco-style impellers with the outer housings perforated to produce harmonizing pitches when the blades inside were turned at high RPM.
    3
  915. You seen those early Spanish rifles? They have curved magazines. Curved. Magazines. ... sorry, I'll be in the car
    3
  916. "That's there to give future generations something to do."
    3
  917. Yeah, AK springs always look woobly like that because the spring is longer than the guide rod it's captive on. As long as it isn't kinked anywhere, it's perfectly fine.
    3
  918. I know, right? My father turned 20 in the early '70s, and listening to his anecdotes from high school and college now, I'm amazed I even exist. So many of his stories sound like they should be police reports that include the phrase "six hours to find the head".
    3
  919. You were concerned that it might be unsafe, so you... sold it to someone else?
    3
  920.  @servicerifle16  Ah, fair enough. The original wording was just a touch concerning.
    3
  921. It's like Chrysler's engineers looked at a list of all the things that people historically found most annoying about performance cars and put them all into one car. Early British sports cars' laughable pup-tent convertible tops with the zip-in plastic windows? Check. Exhaust pipes along the doorsills so you burn your leg on them when you get out, just like on a '67 big-block Corvette? Check. Really uncomfortable seats like the AC Cobra? Check! Ship it! And so, of course, it was... wildly successful and in production for 25 years. Because Car Guys. :)
    3
  922.  @ForgottenWeapons  To be fair, they have to at least nominally defend their PATENT BREVETE PATENT BREVETE BREVETE or they'll lose it. That's just how the law works.
    3
  923. Profit in the public sector is waste, because that's not what the public sector is (supposed to be) for.
    3
  924. ... and possibly not a one-piece crankshaft any longer. :)
    3
  925. "This is outrageous! I shall write to my MP." "You don't have an MP, Rick, you're an anarchist." "Then I shall write to the lead singer of Echo and the Bunnymen. 'Dear... Mister... Echo.'"
    3
  926. Is the forward suppressor tube made from a different metal? I noticed the finish is a little different and wondered if it might be aluminum or the like. (Also enjoyed the thoughtfully provided knurl, to help comrade assassins unscrew it without taking off their gloves. :)
    3
  927. There's a simultaneously funny and chilling anecdote in Midnight in Chernobyl about a Soviet Navy veteran who had been hired as a reactor operator at Chernobyl showing up for his first day on the job, getting his first look at an RBMK (since he had only worked with naval PWRs before), and demanding, "How the hell can you control this hulking piece of shit?" Turned out, they can't always...
    3
  928. Or more! Just look at any early John Woo film. The opening scene in Hard Boiled, for example, clearly shows that a Tokarev's single stack holds at least a hundred rounds. Although, upon reflection, that may be unique to the Norinco Type 54 version, since it's a plot point that the guns in that scene are from the mainland.
    3
  929. Well... the Russian contract guns were Model 1895s, so...
    3
  930. Top Gear has taught me that all the best engineering failures start with the sentence, "How hard can it be?"
    3
  931. On a point of order, the guy who died was clearly Shemp.
    3
  932. The "if you're expecting this car to be like a Mini" part makes me wonder if BMW have actually started nailing their Minis together properly. I had a first-generation one, and while it was the most fun-to-drive car I've ever had, it was broken more often than a school zone speed limit. My favorite of its many inventive failures was the rainy day when one of the sunroof drains got blocked, which rerouted the flow directly into the fuse box in the driver's footwell rather than out the bottom of the car. The electrical system did not appreciate that, and neither did my left leg. At least the engine conked out instantly, so I didn't actually have to worry about operating the clutch with my freshly tased left calf.
    3
  933. I love how cheerfully he said it.
    3
  934. (Narrator: "They did not learn from their mistakes.")
    3
  935. "I'll never call golf a dull game again."
    3
  936. As an aside, John G. Fuller also wrote a book entitled The Ghost of Flight 401, which purported that Eastern Air Lines L-1011s that received parts salvaged from the wreckage of N310EA (which crashed in the Everglades in 1972, while operating the eponymous Flight 401 from New York to Miami) were haunted by the original aircraft's crew. This should tell you something about how scientific his claim that "we almost lost Detroit" was, if the style of the cover art wasn't enough of a clue.
    3
  937. There's a psychiatric hospital in a small city near me that looks like it was designed by a 1930s horror movie production designer. Creepy Victorian red-brick building on a hill, surrounded by just enough trees that you can kind of see it from the nearest main road, with a wrought-iron perimeter fence and everything. It's so stereotypical it feels like someone was being ironic.
    3
  938. No gun at all, just fifteen minutes of hurling tables around and screaming at mannequins.
    3
  939.  @akatripclaymore.9679  To be fair, the M1 carbine also never developed a reputation for exploding. :)
    3
  940.  @matthiasnagorski8411  No, that's true, in retrospect I don't know why I worded it that way. Weather radar images off non-metallic targets all the time. I must have been thinking about magnetic anomaly detection or something.
    3
  941.  @TheWolfsnack  "you see Ivan," etc.
    3
  942.  @airplanemaniacgaming7877  You know, it is possible to know how something is engineered to work without having complete, unqualified faith that it will never fail.
    3
  943. Well, you're one ballpeen hammer away, although admittedly closing them again would be harder.
    3
  944. At this point I'm slightly surprised that Scott doesn't have an actual cannon.
    3
  945.  @Blackjack701AD  A B-25 did hit the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945, but it was lost in fog en route from Massachusetts to Newark, not trying to dock somehow with the top of the building. (B-25s can't dock with buildings, since, not being airships, they can't hover.)
    3
  946. I love the perfect Sovietness of the "solution" to the broken landing lights problem. Firing the gun destroys the aircraft's landing lights? No problem! We'll just take off the landing lights. They're not really that important anyway. :)
    3
  947. Let's be honest with ourselves, that's all anyone who actually buys one of these cars is going to do with it either.
    3
  948. The puff of smoke that comes out when you remove the spent cartridges is strangely satisfying...
    3
  949. What you did there. I see it.
    3
  950. Rewatching this now that I've seen the videos about the Austen SMGs makes me imagine what the Welrod equivalent would've been like. The Ausrod, if you will. I'm envisioning something that looks about the same, but involves a great deal more precision machining for no obvious purpose, and has at least two of those ribbed plastic pistol grips on it. Possibly replacing the rubber wipes with some less effective but more expensive material, such as gold. :)
    3
  951. In re the incredible complexity of the Apollo spacecraft controls: When lightning struck the Apollo 12 stack during launch, and Mission Control needed to tell the crew what they could do to fix the ensuing catastrophic failure of the electrical system, only one man in the room (John Aaron) knew off the top of his head the specific switch that had to be flipped, and only one of the three astronauts aboard (Al Bean) even knew what the hell switch Houston was talking about, let alone where on the panel it was.
    3
  952.  @jimmyrustler8983  Under a really, really big raincoat.
    3
  953. Lots of stuff is flammable if you get it hot enough. Lubricants, cleaning agents, paint, cooking supplies... heck, flour is an explosive under certain conditions.
    3
  954. Five words: foil hologram comic book covers.
    3
  955. And the cleaning rod going "boioioioioing wheeee" out at the end. :)
    3
  956. @Karl Bush Key word, omitted: "Yet."
    3
  957. Standard treatment for the Great Pox before sulfa drugs. As the Victorian saying went, "One night with Venus, a lifetime with mercury."
    3
  958. I've read similar stories about oranges in postwar Germany. A whole generation of German children had never seen one before.
    3
  959.  @Quert_Zuiopue  Yup, that's the word.
    3
  960. Webley made the Gabbett-Fairfax Mars. I think it's safe to say they weren't that bothered about weight or complexity. :)
    3
  961. Like, I daresay, a lot of us, I learned about kosher salt from Alton Brown on Good Eats. Kinda curious if the same is true of Adam. He's a little older than me.
    3
  962.  @doughesson  Well, it would certainly stand out at any commercial range I've ever been to. Glock, AR15, AR15, Glock, Glock, man setting up a miniature WWI machine gun, Glock, AR15...
    3
  963. There's some parallel universe where the French got to that design concept first, and today's naval historians are forced to say thing like "the Japanese museum ship Mikasa is the world's last surviving pre-jauréguiberry battleship."
    3
  964. Speaking of early LEDs being expensive: When my father graduated from college in 1974 and embarked on his career as a mechanical engineer, he went out and bought himself a brand new Texas Instruments SR-50, one of the earliest handheld scientific calculators (back when they were still called "electronic slide rules"). It had a 10-digit LED display and cost $170 (ca. $1,150 today), which was reportedly more than he paid for the car he was driving at the time. Obviously not all of the SR-50's cost came from its display, but even so, it's illustrative of how pricey microelectronics were at that moment in time. A mere two years later, the very similar TI-30 cost all of $25.
    3
  965.  @petesheppard1709  I see what you did there...
    3
  966. "Sprocket" is a funnier word, however. Objection overruled. :)
    3
  967. When I moved into my current house, the living room windows were massive fixed single panes like store windows, facing almost directly west. The living room was more or less intolerable in the afternoon, even in the winter. Replacing them with modern double-hung windows helped a lot, but I still have to run thermal blinds on the inside to keep things under control in the summertime. Maybe I should look into putting up some awnings... Although one consideration there is that the west side of the house isn't one of the gable ends, so in the winter there's a lot of ice and snow falling past those windows from the roof above. That'd have to be taken into account.
    3
  968. Neat. I've got a slightly-more-modern 620 Brownie Hawkeye on my nicknack shelf here--no idea whether it would still work if I could get film for it, my mother gave it to me just to look nice on the shelf--but the dead format I really miss is 126. My very first camera was an Instamatic X-15. I can still call to mind the smell of a fired Magicube...
    3
  969. Once again we see that no industrial system can be made operator-proof... only operator-resistant. If a man decides that in spite of everything he's been taught, he's just going to Metroid his ass into the irradiator room and start moving stuff around by hand, the plant's design isn't going to stop him.
    3
  970. I love how at no point during the war did they get rid of the big red "NOTICE" sign near the stern. Got to warn folks about those triple propellers, after all. :) Also, I think if I had been in charge of White Star post-1919, I'd have ordered the unintentional "ghost camo" look left in place for the rest of the ship's career, in honor of her wartime service.
    3
  971. TBF, that was at least as much about the Imperial Russian Navy being terrible as it was about the Imperial Japanese Navy being good.
    3
  972. The Green Line, in particular, also has the overarching problem that it can't decide whether it's a subway line, a whole tram system, or a really weird bus route. :)
    3
  973.  @GorgeDawes  I especially like the part where it comes up and bumbles around at street level for a while. I will always treasure the memory of my father's reaction to seeing a subway train come up out of a tunnel and cut him off in traffic. (He's... not the city type. :)
    3
  974.  @RonJohn63  How is that relevant? I never said anything about businesses.
    3
  975. Headcanon: This is actually how Scott does laundry, one suit of clothes at a time.
    3
  976. It's because the turret is in the way on the center line, so the audio all has to be moved over to the left. You see a similar sort of thing on top-magazine light machine guns.
    3
  977. I remember in Richard Feynman's memoirs, there's an anecdote where he was asked by a group of rabbis to rule, as a physicist and fellow Jew, on whether the spark that happens inside a light switch constitutes fire, and thereby whether they were breaking the Sabbath by turning electric lights on and off. As I recall, being both irreligious and not that kind of physicist, he declined to offer a ruling.
    3
  978. dealer: OK! (orders car in that godawful day-glo chartreuse)
    3
  979. It's too bad they didn't call it the Heer-Universal-Gewehr instead. It would be too amusing if one of the world's prominent infantry rifle was called the HUG.
    3
  980. Historically, of course, "the Grand Browning" was also the common term for what happened to most of Europe's pants when they saw Napoleon's armies coming in the previous century. Presumably FN's marketing people were playing on that, and the general inability of people in eastern Europe to distinguish Belgium from France.* * none of this is true
    3
  981. Pop Century is the coolest. That's where the wedding party I was part of stayed, the one time I've been to the park. I miss the tie-dye cupcakes to this day. :)
    3
  982. To paraphrase the old saying about lies, a myth can get all the way around the world in the time it takes the truth to put on its pants.
    3
  983. It's all fun and games until Herr Mauser loses an eye.
    3
  984. War... war never changes.
    3
  985. I can see the logic of the buses-only rule (there are presumably a lot fewer of them than there are cars), but it still seems kind of counterintuitive to ban smaller vehicles from a structurally suspect bridge and allow much bigger ones with many more people aboard to use it.
    3
  986. There is also a shocking dearth of reference material on the work of the WAUSERS concern, which I hope Ian plans to rectify.
    3
  987. Lookin' at you, Spanish stapler gun.
    3
  988. Note: The presenter of Megaprojects is Simon Whistler. (Simon Winchester is an author.) I very much hope United States finds a proper home and can be preserved, but if she must go, I'd say better sunk than torn apart on some beach in Bangladesh. :/
    3
  989.  @paavobergmann4920  As far as it was described in Dan van der Vat's Stealth at Sea, there was no consideration in this... unique... ASW doctrine of the possibility that the crew of a submarine thus assaulted might, say, surface and riddle the rowboat and its occupants with bullets. Perhaps the people who formulated it assumed that no U-Boat captain would be willing to surface within rowboat range of the shore. Regardless, there is no record of anyone ever actually attempting it.
    3
  990. Or use a Luger. Chances are Jet Li won't have that little tool you need to get the disassembly lever on one of those to move. :)
    3
  991. I initially thought it was the kerosene lamp pinging as it cooled. Once you know what it is, though, it does provide a potentially useful contrast between ambient background radiation and how radioactive the mantles are.
    3
  992. High-fiving with Death will tend to change a person's outlook somewhat...
    3
  993. They certainly look too carefully and regularly spaced to be accidental.
    3
  994.  @dbclass4075  Sure, yeah. I didn't mean they were all attached to walls, just that wall phones were a thing.
    3
  995. The BLEVE to end all BLEVEs.
    3
  996. Nifty. Does your institution have one of the Solothurn anti-tank rifles as well? I think there are a few more of those floating around than these, but still, a pretty uncommon beast nowadays.
    3
  997. I've seen an illustration somewhere of the Queen Mary standing on end in midtown Manhattan, to make the point that she's virtually the same length as the Chrysler Building is tall. I'm not sure if that's something Cunard produced at the time or a later artist's idea, though I remember it in a vintage style. (Fun fact: the Chrysler Building had only been complete about six months, and was in the middle of its very brief reign as the world's tallest building, when the Queen Mary was laid down!)
    3
  998.  Dave Doherty  Some would be vaporized by the primary fission explosion (and depending on the bomb's design, some of it could fission itself, adding to the yield), but you're right, a lot of it would probably end up as radioactive fallout. It depend on the design of the weapon, and I'm not sure offhand what model the ones involved in this accident were. The distinction I was making in my first reply is that the term "dirty bomb" specifically refers to a conventional explosive, the principal purpose of which is not to do damage with the explosion, but to scatter radioactive debris--whereas an H-bomb whose secondary failed to go off would cause a lot of fallout, but it's still a nuclear bomb. It would still do most of its harm to the immediate area with the explosion itself.
    3
  999.  @samdillon2258  They do, but it's not very good.
    3
  1000. You are, indeed, not the only one.
    3
  1001. Things I don't wanna do, #58,581 in a series: walk around in a combat zone carrying a) a weapon that will make everyone who sees me instantly prioritize me as a target and b) a pressurized tank of explosively flammable stuff on my back.
    3
  1002.  @ICP1SBJ  All cars are numbered cars. Some of them just have more digits than others. :)
    3
  1003.  @skoshman1  Box cannon!
    3
  1004. Hey, neat. I just wrote a little article about Tullio Marengoni and my Beretta 1935 the other day. Do you know if the Models '34 and '35 shared their serial number range? (I'm guessing not, since my '35 is 1941/XIX production with serial 529,000 and some, and I assume they were making more than 4,800 of them a year.)
    3
  1005. Third hypothesis: it's designed to be wielded by the pincer hands of human-sized LEGO minifigures, with an eye toward export sales to Denmark.
    3
  1006. He's actually recording in that "guns, lots of guns" room from The Matrix.
    3
  1007.  @ryandtibbetts2962  Indeed there is, right outside the Briar Patch bookstore, assuming the store survived the plague years (Google Maps seems to think it's still there anyway).
    3
  1008.  @kirkgray6949  trouble is, so does everybody else
    3
  1009. To be fair, if you showed the Deuxième Empire engineers who built that canal a vessel like Ever Given, their monocles would fall out. Sacré merde! This is a canal for ships, Monsieur, not cities.
    3
  1010.  @rolerroleris533  I have no idea, but I doubt it. It sounds like the same kind of folksy silliness as "if you swallow an apple seed, an apple tree will grow in your stomach." Health class in US public schools in the '80s was... a journey.
    3
  1011.  @toasTr0n  I reject your reality and substitute my own!
    3
  1012. Yeah, it's kind of parallel-Earth-looking. I think it's partly the lack of holes and partly because the shape of the prongs is a little off.
    3
  1013. Oof. Oof, I say.
    3
  1014.  @robertgaudet7407  Strangely for an idea as bad as that, it was not adopted by the United States Army.
    3
  1015. My favorite CD-R blanks were the Verbatim ones with the blue dye layer. It was just a nice, soothing color, particularly once the disc was burned. I still have a bunch of old mix discs made with those blanks someplace, probably in the box of stuff that came out of my last car that had a CD player when I sold it.
    3
  1016. I once saw a museum exhibit about the very early canned food that went along with Victorian expeditions to places like the Arctic and Antarctica. They were much larger cans than we're used to today, more like two-gallon paint cans, and the people who had to use them didn't even have openers that good to use with them. Their usual method was hammer and chisel. One of the cans in the exhibit had been opened in such a manner, and it looked... well, about like you would expect a big can that had been opened with a hammer and chisel by a man wearing heavy fur mittens to look. Against a backdrop like that, maybe it's not a surprise that once we got to the "knife with gearwheel" stage, most people decided eh, good enough. :)
    3
  1017. There are many worse ways to spend an afternoon than listening to Ian talk about a machine gun while unpacking my Pistols of the Warlords shipment. This book is massive! The UPS guy remarked on how dense the box was. :)
    3
  1018. I wouldn't read too much into it. Sometimes a structural decision is just a structural decision...
    3
  1019.  @hippiusteenius  "Comrade, you have been selected for a critical state security assignment..."
    3
  1020. He means the Einsteinian one.
    3
  1021. I remember seeing Ewan McGregor tell a story somewhere--might've been one of the travel series he did with Charley Boorman--about asking for part of his pay on one of the Star Wars movies to be a particular model of motorcycle, and George Lucas agreeing, but only on the condition that they wouldn't let him have it until after production so that it wouldn't screw up the movie if he killed himself with it.
    3
  1022.  @YoungCarWiz  I'm old enough to remember when "the whole thing is a phone!" was the punch line of a parody car commercial. I kinda miss those days.
    3
  1023. I had a housemate in my post-college shared-apartment phase who spent a summer doing light industrial temp work. The stories he had to tell... man. Not even once.
    3
  1024. "I'm so done with these bears not wanting the fish."
    3
  1025.  @alexfrideres1198  IIRC, he didn't forget, but it was deleted early in production for some reason.
    3
  1026. "Mother of God, I never knew it could do that. My worldview is undone."
    3
  1027. 20th-century French factories had some epic names. My favorite that I've heard of so far is one of the private firms that made Model 1935S pistols after the war: Société d'Applications Générales de l'Électricité et de la Mécanique (SAGEM). "Society for General Applications of Electricity and Mechanics", or thereabouts.
    3
  1028.  @HaloofBlood1  They don't like to talk about The Accident.
    3
  1029. I assume they had/have postal police, the same as we do in the US. Although I suppose, back in those days, it's not inconceivable that the individual letter carriers were also armed--at least those operating in areas where wildlife attacks and/or bandits were known problems.
    3
  1030. A dust collector can also be a lamp wtih the right ignition source... for some values of lamp.
    3
  1031.  @DarkestVampire92  The Russo-Japanese War had been over for nearly three years at that point. In the summer of 1908, the Tsar's regime would have been more preoccupied with the ongoing procession of savage reprisals against everyone who participated in or supported the Revolution of 1905.
    3
  1032. For some reason, "... and the stairs hosed down" is the most chilling part to me. I mean, I get that there was a war on, and what else were they going to do, but even so, it has that inescapable whiff of utilitarian callousness about it. Like various accounts of amusement park ride fatalities involving the phrase "closed for cleaning".
    3
  1033. You have to admit the camel was spot-on, though.
    3
  1034. The guy at the Waffle House is like "Wait, I thought if you made it to Los Santos Customs you were home free."
    3
  1035. It'd be funny if the "alarm sound" ones were literally just the soundtrack for a ridiculously inefficient alarm system that's designed to tune a loudspeaker to that frequency if the alarm goes off rather than having an annunciator of its own. Has to be running all the time, since you never know when the alarm might go off! :)
    3
  1036. It does if you think of the railway as a river, and London as its headwaters.
    3
  1037.  @a64738  Harsh. Do you have cheap gas or hydroelectric there, or are you just screwed?
    3
  1038.  @grafando  Yeah, I looked into switching to a propane/heat pump combo (like my father's done at his place) a couple years ago, couldn't get financing for the $10K+ it would have cost up front. They said my existing system wasn't old enough to justify replacing it.
    3
  1039.  @KentuckyMan30  Huh. You know what did have a central tire inflation system? The DUKW. Yeah! The amphibious truck from World War II. So much for progress, I guess. :)
    3
  1040. I will say that I really like that the front and rear grips are the same part. That's a legit manufacturing simplfication, although I admit it's somewhat offset by the fact that the original gun didn't have any grips at all. :)
    3
  1041. The high school in Bethel, Maine, is called Telstar Regional High School, because it's in the district serving Andover, where Telstar 1's US ground station was. A bit oddly, the school was founded five years after Telstar 1 went offline, but fortunately, the station was also capable of servicing other satellites (including later-generation Telstars), so the name was stll current. (Fun fact: Andover Earth Station is still operational today, although sadly, the giant antenna it used to communicate with the early Telstars and RCA Relay satellites was torn down in the '80s.)
    3
  1042. And you get 100 extra lives.* * I don't recommend you test this
    3
  1043.  @jaymzx0  Yep, which is why you'll often find the local hot rod guys hanging around the airport in small towns that have one. :)
    3
  1044. "Do you have any idea what the street value of this fungus is?"
    3
  1045. A Series of Unfortunate Events, Soviet aviation edition, Volume XVI. I love this channel. :)
    3
  1046. I was just old enough when this happened to remember the world before it, kind of like people born in the early '90s can vaguely remember the world before 9/11. In both cases, L.P. Hartley's line from his 1953 novel The Go-Between applies: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
    3
  1047. Heck, a lot of Star Trek props were contemporary items. There's a whole coffee table book about the show's use of mid-century modern furniture and whatnot; it's called Designing the Final Frontier. Pretty neat if you're into that kind of thing.
    3
  1048. What's weird is that Subaru did literally use the pound sign, #, when they wanted the sharp sign, ♯. I guess their graphic designer didn't know the Unicode entity number for it.
    3
  1049. # = pound (weight), as in "5#" (read "five pounds"); the musical sharp is a different symbol, ♯, which has no horizontal lines £ = pound sterling (money), as in £5 (also read "five pounds") Now you know!
    3
  1050. Fun fact: that happens in UK Received Pronunciation when one word ends with an A and the next word starts with one. It's why, for example, BBC car-show presenters say "Honda Civic", but "Honder Accord". Without that "again" there, M would have pronounced it normally, as he does later in the scene, when he tells Bond to, "Just leave the Beretta."
    3
  1051. @J500 L6000 Techmoan has talked about those a couple of times. IIRC, he's dismissed the idea of getting one, mainly because they can only play plain black records (no colored or transparent vinyl, picture discs, etc).
    3
  1052. I first went to WDW at 39 for a wedding, which meant I was able to keep an open mind because someone else was paying anyway. I had a lot of fun (apart from a temporarily-life-altering sunburn that, arguably, was my own fault for being outdoors in Florida while taking azithromycin), and the conclusion I eventually came to was that I'm well outside their target demographic, but I enjoy the showmanship and the craftsmanship enough to make up for it. It really is an amazing achievement on a lot of levels, even if you have neither kids nor any interest in things that are for them. I did get shouted at for taking a picture of a sign, but, I mean, how can you put me in front of a sign that says CAUTION: HOSE CREWS IN ACTION and expect me not to photograph it?
    3
  1053. The "only" in that last sentence is doing some heavy lifting, given that the entire rest of the world has a total of eight aircraft carriers, all of them significantly smaller than any given one of ours.
    3
  1054. In the Eurospec cars, that engages flight mode. I don't think it does anything in the ones made for the US market.
    3
  1055. Whenever I see anything about a pepperbox, I think of the passage in Mark Twain's Roughing It about his fellow stagecoach passenger who was armed with an Allen, and how if it didn't get what he was shooting at, it would be sure to fetch something else. :)
    3
  1056. I think they made the guidance systems for the X-Wings' proton torpedoes.
    3
  1057. In 1184, a significant portion of the nobility of the Holy Roman Empire gathered in the Thuringian town of Erfurt at the order of King Heinrich VI of Germany, in order to mediate a feud between two of his vassals. The wooden floor of their impromptu council room in one of Erfurt Cathedral's outbuildings collapsed, dropping most of those present into the cesspit in the cellar. It's believed about 60 of them died--some killed by the fall, but most drowned in the sewage. It's still known to historians of the period as the Erfurt Latrine Disaster.
    3
  1058.  @thischannelisbackon5679  It's even wilder than that. Usually what he did was think through the process, then build it, then sell it to Winchester and let them put it on paper. :)
    3
  1059. Who would have guessed that, fifty years on, the Summer of Love generation would adopt the "set the place on fire on the way out" strategy en masse?
    3
  1060. That's the former consumer electronics division, which is now a completely unrelated company with the same name (Motorola Mobility). It's kind of like how the Rolls-Royce that makes cars no longer has anything to do with the ones that makes jet engines. The Motorola that makes public safety comms equipment (Motorola Solutions) is still an American company, for the moment.
    3
  1061. "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Container ships on fire off the coast of India. I watched tankers glitter in the dark by the Bab el-Mandab." More seriously, this reminds me of the MSC Flaminia disaster, in which an incorrectly loaded (and IIRC also mislabeled) tanktainer of some not-entirely-stable plastic precursor chemical blew up in the hold, flung containers all over the shop, and burned for days. Hopefully this time everyone got out OK.
    3
  1062. Fast-forward one more generation and you have generals resisting the idea of equipping their men with repeaters, because they'd just waste ammunition! (And then along comes Hiram Maxim saying, "No, no, boys, you want to talk about wasting ammunition, watch THIS." :)
    3
  1063. At today's TP prices, that would cost about $40,000.
    3
  1064.  @s.teamspark3858  Bacterial evolution outpaces antibiotic development, multi-drug-resistant strains are proliferating... the party's not completely over yet, but it's definitely winding down.
    3
  1065. Shades of the Gabbet-Fairfax (Webley) Mars, which was described in a British Royal Navy trial report as "singularly unpleasant and alarming". Quote: "No one who fired once with the pistol wished to fire it again."
    3
  1066. ... There is more than one university in Texas, you know. It's a big state.
    3
  1067. The Grey Ghost was originally so named for a collaborative marking effort with the Gotham City-based mystery man of the same name, but then it became unfashionable for costumed heroes to carry guns and he backed out at the last minute. Not a lot of people know that!
    3
  1068. I had never heard of this before, and my first thought upon seeing the video title was along the lines of, "How the f-ck can you get killed woodburning? This I gotta see." I should have known that people will always find creative ways to delete themselves on the Internet.
    3
  1069. I know you didn't mean it this way, but I love the way your wording suggests that the Spanish Guardia Civil is one guy. :)
    3
  1070. Someone should have faced 21 counts of reckless manslaughter, at the very least, for causing the fleet to be un-grounded while the cause of BOAC 781's crash was still unknown.
    3
  1071. Fun fact: .50 BMG was originally developed as an antiaircraft round... when aircraft were made from sticks and rags. (Although to be fair, massed fire from M2 machine guns was the standard US fighter armament into the Korean War, when it became obvious that they weren't going to cut it against jets.)
    3
  1072. Having had both, I would say I liked the exterior styling of the old one better, but the interior of the new model is vastly superior. And since that's where you're spending your time, well...
    3
  1073. Over here they're called streetcars, and some cities still have them. ("Tram" is a verb here. It's what you do before you start work on a vertical milling machine to make sure the quill is plumb and level. :)
    3
  1074. Mr. Wonderful OK, here's an example: the 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham. Electric seats with memory, electric door locks, electric windows, electric radio antenna, automatic headlights with automatic hi-beam dimming (under the delightfully 1950s trade name "Autronic Eye"), cruise control, pneumatic suspension, all-transistor radio with automatic signal seeking... $13,000+ at a time when the median income was around $3,700. Sure, all of that stuff generally kept working for no more than a year or two, but in 1957 that wasn't the point. :)
    3
  1075. Don't forget all the outfits that won't be affected by this in any way, but will use it as their latest excuse for lousy service, just for a change of pace. "Oh, yeah, there's a dockworkers' strike in Canada. Supply chains! Nothing we can do!"
    3
  1076.  @coolsenjoyer  You see that a lot in detective fiction of the period as well, especially British detective novels (and European ones in UK-made English translations). Often the context will leave no doubt that an automatic is being discussed; sometimes the phrase "automatic revolver" even gets used, and it's obvious they're not talking about a Webley-Fosbery. :)
    3
  1077. Or just get six Honda S2000s and hitch them together to a chariot like a team of horses. That would probably be pretty cheap.
    3
  1078. * some assembly required
    3
  1079. But then people would have gotten really mad at them for burning them all down before the big game...
    3
  1080. I can't stand it. I know you planned it.
    3
  1081. As a teenager, I visited Mammoth Cave in Kentucky on a family trip once. It was a lot of fun, but then, it's a national park, with all that that entails--there are handrails, posted routes, rangers, all that jazz. It's set up for tourists, not cavers. Any part of it that is any more dangerous than being inside a school gym is blocked off and heavily signposted. That's how I like my caves.
    3
  1082. Cool! I have one of these that's half early commercial L-35 (frame and bolt, still matching, interestingly the serial number is very slightly less than 6800) and half Swedish m/40 (barrel and upper). I'm guessing somebody blew up the original upper at some point and a Swedish one was easier to get hold of to replace it. Seems to work fine, although based on behavior I've seen in Swedes and Finns online, its hybrid nature presumably means it hates its own guts and spends a lot of time sniping at itself on social media. :)
    3
  1083. A question I ask myself routinely when I wake up to discover that some new body part has gone out of service in the night...
    3
  1084. When you get right down to it, all machine guns are pretty gauche.
    3
  1085. He's not old enough to remember the early '90s.
    3
  1086. With the right equipment, it's possible to screw with any electronic signaling system.
    3
  1087. "... Bugga."
    3
  1088. Does this system really strike you as the kind of thing designed with the level of foresight required to include a key logger?
    3
  1089. When I was a kid, my father had a buddy who had a Husqvarna dirt bike.
    3
  1090. The thing about the pistol storing up used clips until it's full and then dumping them out the hatch reminds me of what happens if you leave the ejection port on an F(S)2000 closed. Now I need to go watch that video again.
    3
  1091. His Swedish Majesty's warship Vasa would like a word as well.
    3
  1092. As long as he doesn't do that thing Hoovie does, where he starts the car and then immediately revs it before it's had any sort of chance to warm up or circulate oil. That makes my fingernails itch every time he does it.
    3
  1093.  @thescatologistcopromancer3936  A mere 25 years in my state, and lemme tell ya, I died inside the first time I saw a car like the one I drove in high school with an Antique Auto plate on it.
    3
  1094. I was disappointed that it didn't come up, but I bet each one of those cartridges was worth more than the first car I bought. (That may say as much about my first car as it does about the value of Solothurn ammo, admittedly. :)
    3
  1095. Ye gods, imagine Doug reviewing a DS or a CX. The quirk density might do him physical harm.
    3
  1096.  @MonkeyJedi99  That is genius.
    3
  1097. BTW, that sun symbol is the national emblem of the Republic of China, which was the Chinese government between the fall of the last Qing emperor in 1912 and the Communist victory in the Civil War in 1949. Modern-day Taiwan continues to use the very same flag, since its government has maintained since 1949 that it still is the Republic of China. And if that sounds like a can of worms, you have no idea. For more information, watch the Olympic opening ceremonies next summer and wait for the commentators to explain what the heck is with the team from "Chinese Taipei" when they march in.
    2
  1098. ... and I came back to note that I've run into an odd example of that change in magazine doctrine since first watching this video. I got some new Browning Hi-Power magazines recently, and the new ones have a little spring on the bottom plate. This takes up tension against the lip of the magazine well, so that when you press the release they don't just fall cleanly out (which my old ones never had any trouble doing anyway), they are PROPELLED out with significant force. This seems frankly unnecessary to me, but evidently someone at FN thought it was a good and needful thing.
    2
  1099. True, but the sentiment is the same. :) I kind of love how charmingly optimistic all tangent sights seem to be. I've got an SMLE with a tangent sight that goes out to 2,000 yards, which... I mean, that's more than a mile. I have no doubt that .303 British can theoretically be effective at that range, but can you even see a man a mile away with the naked eye, let alone hit him with an iron-sighted rifle? I'm pretty sure I can't.
    2
  1100. It's funny to me that they pointed to the Walther MP as an example of a viable blowback 9mm, given that (as we have seen on this very channel) Walther themselves reached exactly the opposite conclusion from the MP experience. :)
    2
  1101. +FlymanMS And that one South African shotgun. No, not the Street Sweeper, the other one. The pump-action one that's designed so that you hit your trigger finger with the pump handle if you have proper trigger discipline.
    2
  1102. +Zack “Zerg620” Bond Makes it sound even more like the background music on "How It's Made"!
    2
  1103. Fun fact: the Sopwith Camel's rotary engine produced such a ridiculous amount of torque in such a lightweight airframe that the aircraft was markedly easier to bank (and therefore turn) to the right. This was one of the things that made it such a handful.
    2
  1104. I love how people point this out, like we in the US just hadn't noticed.
    2
  1105. +Jesus von Nazaret I think they're grandfathered by their C&R status, but don't quote me in court. (Edit: Duh, I ought to have said "with", not "by". In my defense, I went to American public schools. :)
    2
  1106. +Forgotten Weapons Is the Leader we see here in fact the same one that guest-stars in that video? (I'm guessing it is, given how few there are, but one never knows...)
    2
  1107. "You'll see a lot of debate among stoners..." Wait, what? Ohhh, amongst owners. :)
    2
  1108. Meanwhile, one dimension over, a celebrated Smill & Welson expert is giving a talk on counterfeit firearms at the company's world-famous headquarters in Sprangfeld, Musachusetts. His first exhibit: a hilariously bad copy of a third-model double-action revolver...
    2
  1109. Uryendel Well as it happens, I'm a part of the US who's educated in science, and while I'm all for the use of metric measurements IN science for portability's sake, I see no need to go to the trouble and expense of adopting it in everyday life.  International portability and precision are not necessary in, e.g., local weather reports, how much meat is in a package at the supermarket, or the volume of fuel dispensed at the corner gas station.  We don't need to abandon the habits of lifetimes and go to the hassle of becoming intuitively familiar with metric weights and Celsius temperatures just because foreigners are annoyed that they might occasionally might have to look up something we mentioned on YouTube.
    2
  1110. Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks'
    2
  1111. I have to bury Talking Room videos behind other windows and treat them like podcasts, or I'll just spend the whole time trying to make out what all the books are in the background. Is that just me?
    2
  1112. I knew that grip geometry reminded me of something. It had to be either a C93 Borchardt or the United Nations building in New York. :)
    2
  1113. This is making me yearn almost tearfully for the Model 8 I had to sell some years ago.
    2
  1114. +Jovial Bard (セクシー ホモゲイ) For reference, there's a similar sort of thing going on with .308 Winchester (civilian) and 7.62x51mm NATO (military).
    2
  1115. TheKodiak72 I'm told, oddly enough, that it's the other way around with .308/7.62mm NATO, though to a lesser degree.
    2
  1116. +Chad Barrett Smartguns are awesome! As long as you remember to give the other shadowrunners on your team the little ID widgets, you can hose down whole areas and never hit a friendly. ... Oh wait, you're talking about in real life. Yeah, terrible idea. (I tend to think access control is all well and good in theory, actually, but A) there are too many variables for it to be practical and B) electronics and firearms are just never going to get along without sci-fi handwaving. The forces involved are too significant.)
    2
  1117. "SCDG" stands for "sans culottes du gouvernement" - "without the government's pants". Also, that isn't true.
    2
  1118. .22 Extra Long, wow. That's pretty obscure. Would one of these take .22LR? IIRC, Extra Long was longer, but I'm not sure about the relative pressures involved.
    2
  1119. Also, upon re-watching: I think I can safely say that, if I had one of these or a Tavor, I would be actuating that super-convenient magazine release all the time... only rarely having actually intended to do so.
    2
  1120. Schwarzlose should have tried that as a slogan. "The Model 1908: Not necessarily that bad of a gun!"
    2
  1121. +Chris from cymru Alternately, it uses its phone camera on public transportation to take surreptitious photographs of women it does not know.
    2
  1122. To be fair, worries about German saboteurs interfering with American industry when the US entered the war were not completely daft. Consider the case of the American Metal Company and its molybdenum mines in Colorado... which, if you followed the paper trail far enough back, belonged in large part to Metallgesellschaft of Frankfurt am Main. A federal statute delightfully called the Trading with the Enemy Act was involved.
    2
  1123. It is amusingly coincidental that a real scarab is a kind of dung beetle.
    2
  1124. You'd need professional help if you had two project cars going at once. Or, wait. That's probably not what you meant.
    2
  1125. He'll be fine as long as the tires are-- "Also the tires are pretty worn." --uh-oh.
    2
  1126. Why did Braverman not call this the John Hancock? Seriously now.
    2
  1127. In re the Thompson gun, I love the vintage ads showing, e.g., a cowboy-lookin' guy spraying a burst of automatic fire from his front porch at Unspecified Intruders menacing his property, as part of the company's pitch that it was the ideal home defense weapon. It's hard to imagine that that was ever really considered a good idea by... well, anybody.
    2
  1128.  @warshipsatin8764  I, uh... tend to doubt that, but then I'm squeamish about the idea of fully automatic gunfire inside the house in general. You do you. :)
    2
  1129. I like the way Simpson Ltd. do their import marks: discreetly, in tiiiiny print, usually someplace that isn't hidden but isn't glaringly obvious either.
    2
  1130. Have you noticed that you can kind of tell where Ian is from the color of the tablecloth in the thumbnail? White is James Julia, black is Rock Island, red is Mystery Collector's Place... not sure where the room with the yellow one is. :)
    2
  1131.  @zdgfagdfgdfssdgfdsfd  Volley fire with handguns?
    2
  1132. No, because it's a broomhandle Mauser. They have an internal bolt that reciprocates, not a slide. The scope is mounted on top of the barrel/upper, which only moves a few millimeters.
    2
  1133. +Forgotten Weapons It's got some epic acoustics.
    2
  1134. The Great War Good to know! "Storm" is one of those books I'm very glad I read, and never particularly want to read again. (SEE ALSO: Henri Barbusse's "Under Fire", which is sort of the much-less-well-known poilu counterpart to "All Quiet".)
    2
  1135. I just bought one of these on gunbroker and would like you to know that it is your fault. :)
    2
  1136. It's a short recoil action; the barrel only moves a few millimeters before it stops and the bolt carries on without it. Therefore, the optic could only move far enough to hit your face if it was attached to a slide, which the Mauser doesn't have (unless you've got your eye pressed up against the scope like it's a submarine's periscope, which I'm reasonably sure is not how this one is meant to be used).
    2
  1137. (it's spelled "blackguard" btw)
    2
  1138. +Luke DS Mauser C96 ("Broomhandle") pistols had them, because they could be configured into a sort of carbine, and Broomies were very popular in China. A lot of the cargo-culty aesthetic features of Mystery Pistols are cribbed from them, including the fake tangent sights.
    2
  1139. I expect it varies a lot based on where you are, but here in the US, they seem to run in the neighborhood of $700 to $1,000 depending on type.
    2
  1140.  @viniciussurkamp6633  See also: Wankel rotary engine, which is only funny if you don't know (or disregard) that it's pronounced more like "vonkle".
    2
  1141.  @frederickmiles327  Comparing a PR flack you tend to disagree with to Paul Joseph Goebbels seems... out of proportion.
    2
  1142. Worth keeping in mind that hearing loss wasn't considered a line-of-duty injury in those days, and I'm pretty sure the gunners involved in the regularly scheduled test firings would have suffered some.
    2
  1143. It seems like at least once a year here in northern Maine, some small group of geniuses will decide to spend the hottest, dryest day of the summer cutting brush, and if they don't end up in the hospital with heat exhaustion, they'll generally cap off the day by knocking back a case of beer and burning the slash pile without a permit. Keeps the local volunteer fire departments on their toes.
    2
  1144.  JAG  "Slow learners or just hard headed?" Ockham's razor suggests a third interpretation: that's what they had.
    2
  1145. Less dangerous than using the Two Hazmat Guys as a drink trigger. In the episodes about radiation accidents, that could get a person hospitalized! (n.b. this is not a criticism, I love the Two Hazmat Guys)
    2
  1146. So... the second model has a lever on its lever. I feel like there's a pop culture reference I could be making here.
    2
  1147. Now I can only picture Karl Brugger as Michael Caine's character from The Italian Job. "Hold on a minute, lads. I've got a great idea."
    2
  1148. Now... let's not get carried away here. I had an '89 Crown Vic, and it was a fine automobile with many admirable qualities, but with the best will in the world, it bore no resemblance to a leaf on the wind. If I had to come up with a simile, I would go for something more along the lines of "like a tank on the beach." :)
    2
  1149. C'mon, though, several sellers offering the same item at prices that are a) clearly insane and b) within a few cents of each other? There's got to be some unintended automation consequences happening there, it doesn't make any sense otherwise.
    2
  1150. It makes me think of those toy guns from when I was a kid, that had a flywheel in them that you'd pump a geared trigger to get spinning, and sparks would shoot out of the muzzle. Try selling that to children at the corner store nowadays. :)
    2
  1151. "A pom pom is an excellent weapon when you are using it but it is a horrid thing when the other chap has got it. I really don't think it has ever done much harm on either side out here but the moral effect is great. It is a splendid thing." - Sgt. P.C. Jonas, Forty-third (Suffolk) Company Imperial Yeomanry, quoted in Stephen M. Miller's Volunteers on the Veld: Britain's Citizen-Soldiers and the South African War, 1899-1902
    2
  1152. It hurts me on many levels to hear something published in the 1980s described as "period", even though it's absolutely fair. :)
    2
  1153. I wrote a paper about the Therac-25 for a required course in the responsible conduct of research while working on my history MA, and the most striking thing I discovered while researching it was that no one seems to know who the programmer was. Leveson and Turner's landmark paper for Computer in 1993 has a sidebar in which they wrote, "We know that the software for the Therac-25 was developed by a single person, using PDP-11 assembly language, over a period of several years. The programmer left AECL in 1986. In a lawsuit connected with one of the accidents, the lawyers were unable to obtain information about the programmer from AECL... none of the AECL employees questioned could provide any information about his educational background or experience... We have been unable to learn anything about his background." Even his name appears to be unknown to the authors of every article about the incident I could find. He's just this mysterious figure who wrote some buggy software for AECL, then disappeared almost exactly when the one without hardware in place to prevent his software's flaws from killing people started killing people. The lawyers involved in civil suits couldn't find him, nor could the investigators who eventually started looking into the matter for Canadian and American nuclear regulators. He's like some kind of PDP-11-programming Keyser Söze. As far as I was able to determine, he's never been heard from since.
    2
  1154. "It's an ingenious solution to a problem that never should have existed in the first place." - James May
    2
  1155. Meanwhile, I was once given a car off a dealership's used lot as a service loaner, and discovered when I had to get the registration out of the glove box that the previous owner's financing paperwork was still in there. Complete identity theft kit, just add criminal intent. Fortunately for them I didn't have any.
    2
  1156. One thing to keep in mind is that modern Japan's civilian gun laws come from the American occupation following World War II. It fits into the broader context of the occupation authorities' program to expunge the idea of arms as an acceptable tool of conflict resolution from the Japanese national character. Having dismantled the country's armed forces and imposed upon it a constitution that strictly limited future militarization, MacArthur and company were hardly going to turn around and leave the general populace armed and potentially capable of uprising. (For a great deal more about the MacArthur occupation administration's efforts to remodel Japanese society on pretty much every level between 1945 and 1952, I recommend Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower.)
    2
  1157. The bit of the human brain responsible for evaluating the potential consequences of actions typically isn't fully developed until the mid-twenties (in people for whom it fully develops at all--some people's never do, for various reasons).
    2
  1158.  @Sanakudou  I posted a link to a fairly significant NIH study of the phenomenon in response to a previous reply, but it seems to have been removed. I guess the idea of someone backing up an assertion with actual data is so anathema to the YouTube comment environment that YT couldn't tolerate it. :)
    2
  1159.  @doughesson  Back when I was in high school, one of the stock pitches used by the Air Force recruiter assigned to my school was that if you're not going to college, you should enlist in the Air Force, because unlike every other branch of the service, only their officers get shot at. (It isn't true, but then, very little a military recruiter at a high school says ever is.)
    2
  1160.  @doughesson  Nope. Nor the enlisted crew on cargo aircraft; they're not combatants as such, but they sure get shot at. (For that matter, being a maintenance technician at a rear-area airbase is no guarantee.)
    2
  1161. There's a modem-encoded text file included as one of the audio tracks on Information Society's 1992 album Peace and Love, Inc. under the title "300BPS N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode or ASCII Download)", which, conveniently, is also the instructions for how to decode it. It's a short story about some weird stuff that supposedly happened to the band in Brazil.
    2
  1162. I feel like the Spanish traffic police issuing submachine guns is a topic that deserved a closer look, because, I mean, they're traffic police with submachine guns.
    2
  1163. "It should cost 40,000 zarps."
    2
  1164. Yeah, that isn't what a Dutch door is.
    2
  1165. some old grey Federales say "We could have had him any day We only let him go so long Out of kindness, I suppose"
    2
  1166. I had an uncle who was in the Navy, and always made his coffee like that after he got out. Apparently that's a Thing in the sea services? Every other coffee drinker in the family thought it was deeply weird. :)
    2
  1167. That first hypothetical scenario comes across as pretty sketchy: "If you've had a couple drinks, make sure there's nothing obviously wrong with you car so you have a better chance of getting away with it." Um...
    2
  1168. (looks at his hammer bite scar) No design flaws... right. ;)
    2
  1169. Backpfeifengesicht, n. a face badly in need of a fist.
    2
  1170. There is a fascinating book out there called Japan's Decision for War: Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences, which is a collection of minutes and transcripts of high-level policy meetings within the Japanese government in the year leading up to the war, translated and edited by Japanese scholar Ike Nobutaka. It's long out of print, having been published in 1967, but I tracked down a copy a few years ago to use as a primary source in my first graduate-level history paper. "Magical thinking" is an apt phase, because that is literally what was in play in a lot of cases. Any time someone with some sense brought up an obvious problem, like the fact that Japan had an oil-burning navy and no sources of oil, the war hawks (usually in the person of Prime Minister Tōjō) countered that they'd come up with it "somehow" and everyone else seemed perfectly satisfied that that was... you know, a plan in some way. To read those transcripts is to see serious, professional policymakers visibly believing in the Easter Bunny. (My personal favorite moment in any of the meetings is from the May 22, 1942 Liaison Conference (a conference of high government ministers that was not held in the Emperor's presence, as opposed to an Imperial Conference, which was basically the same thing but with the Emperor in the room), during which Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke answered a simple question about diplomatic preparations for the pending operation against French Indochina with a long, elliptical rant about the need to take action against Britain and the United States. At the end of this rant, Navy Minister Oikawa inquired aloud of the room at large, with Matsuoka sitting right there, "Is Matsuoka sane?" ... and no one had an answer for him. That is some next-level shade.)
    2
  1171. "It's supposed to be Clair de Lune..."
    2
  1172. I'll never know how fast I had my '84 Oldsmobile going that one time, because the speedometer only went to 85, but it took a good four seconds to come back off the peg when I lifted my foot. The best part was, it felt exactly the same as 55, only with a little more wind noise, because it was a two-ton Oldsmobile, and they didn't get excited about anything. :)
    2
  1173. The whole "gun swapped for larger one to show up better on screen" thing has happened more than once in spy productions, oddly enough: the Mauser 1934-based U.N.C.L.E. Special prop in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was replaced with one based on the much larger Walther P-38 after the first season for the same reason (and because, as it happens, the Mauser didn't run very well on blanks either). Sometimes these lessons have to be learned more than once. :)
    2
  1174.  @ak2nda695  Well, you better hope that's a zero/zero ejection seat. :)
    2
  1175.  @sharkycat1096  He's in Georgia, so add Waffle House to the list.
    2
  1176. This one cuts close to the bone for me. I grew up in northern Maine, where one of the constant presences in the life of my hometown was the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad. I was working as a reporter for our local newspaper in 2002 and covered the B&A's bankruptcy, as well as the following year's acquisition of its assets by Rail World, which organized them into the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic. A year or so after that, the MM&A invited me to their maintenance and repair depot to cover a visit by some technicians from one of Rail World's other subsidiaries, Baltic Road OÜ in Estonia, who were there to be trained on the care and feeding of some ex-B&A locomotives that RW was transferring to their road. While I was there, being familiar since childhood with the way the B&A had done things, I was struck by what a slender shoestring the MM&A was operating on by comparison--and this was as the successor of a railroad that had gone bankrupt. The decline in both standards and the means to meet them under the new ownership was heartbreakingly obvious. The article I ended up writing did not please the new management, and I was never invited back. That suited me fine; I was too fond of the B&A's memory to want closer association with its walking corpse, and that's pretty much all the MM&A was. Nobody around here who knew the railroad's history was surprised by Lac-Mégantic. Appalled, yes... but not surprised.
    2
  1177. For many years here in the US state of Maine, the weight limit for 18-wheelers was 80,000 pounds on the Interstate (per federal regulations), but 100,000 pounds on state highways. The practical effect of this was that virtually all trucking companies routed their lines in Maine onto state highways, despite the fact that they're virtually all two-lane, opposing-traffic, non-limited-access roads passing through populated areas. To the best of my knowledge, this didn't lead to a disaster on the scale of the one described here, but a lot of smaller accidents happened that didn't need to before the state finally secured a waiver allowing it to extend the 100,000-pound limit to the Interstate. (This has had its own problems, most prominently the fact that, since the Interstates were engineered for the 80,000-pound limit, they're all rutted to hell now, which makes driving on them in rain and snow a real treat. The smart thing would have been to lower the limit on state highways instead, but that would have cost some state legislators' constituents a few bucks, so that idea was never gonna fly.)
    2
  1178. This concept reminds me a bit of the Staten Island Ferry pilot who blacked out from a drug interaction and didn't even notice he'd lost consciousness until he suddenly discovered that he'd rammed the pier. He was alone in the wheelhouse at the time (a violation of policy), so no one can be sure, but he was still standing at his station when he came to and not lying on the floor, so it seems unlikely that he passed out in the "traditional" sense. Mind you, in his case he was taking tramadol and operating (very!) heavy machinery, which is not an advisable combination.
    2
  1179. I find this type of disaster especially chilling for some reason. Suddenly discovering that the bridge I'm driving on doesn't go all the way across is a thing I've had occasional nightmares about since I was little. I think I can trace this to a childhood encounter with the bridge over to Deer Isle in Maine, a relatively short span that had to be built ridiculously tall in the middle so as not to inconvenience some bougie yacht club nearby.
    2
  1180. If you look at the markings, it's actually the Taurus The Judge. :)
    2
  1181. The closest thing to that I can think of offhand is the old Colt-Browning M1895 "potato digger" machine gun. It's not a toggle lock, but it does have a sort of gas-powered lever-action-rifle thing going on that flails down underneath the gun in operation (hence the nickname). Different locking principle, similar sort of motion involved.
    2
  1182. It makes me obscurely sad that I live in a world where someone is making reproductions of the Ithaca Auto & Burglar, but not these.
    2
  1183.  @punkdigerati  Well, sure. On the other hand, you can probably get cosmetic surgery for less than $200 in some places too, but I wouldn't recommend it.
    2
  1184. Do you see torpedo boats?
    2
  1185.  @Jeff.78  Or throw it out of timing and bend a valve or two, if it's a type that has valves.
    2
  1186. "That's the one thing I could never stomach about living in Santa Carla: all the damn vampires."
    2
  1187. Here in Maine, in addition to our pre-statehood importance to the War of 1812, we also hold the unique distinction of being the only U.S. state to fight* its own private war with a foreign power. The one and only armed engagement of the Aroostook War between Maine and British New Brunswick, the Battle of Caribou, raged for at least an hour on New Year's Eve of 1838–39 and resulted in two** casualties: a pair of New Brunswicker lumberjacks who were attacked by a bear while attempting*** to have a gunfight with a group of Maine militiamen in the woods. True story! * FSVO "fight" ** three if you count the bear, who unfortunately did not survive her tactically unsound decision * unsuccessfully
    2
  1188. I used to have a '77 Chevy pickup that gave me exactly this sense of calm liberation. It had 250,000 miles on it and had been painted an odd sea green by a previous owner, despite its black and maroon vinyl interior. No body panel on it lacked some sort of percussive deformation. The passenger door worked only intermittently. (I think the truck had been rolled at some point and the door frame on that side no longer lined up quite right. On hot days, when the metal would expand, the door wouldn't open.) The tires were four different brands. If anyone had ever stolen it, he would have decreased his net worth. But it ran fine, it could pass state inspection, and that was all that mattered at that stage in my life. Once, a kid bashed his E-class into the side of it in an icy parking lot at UMaine, and once he backed his car up away from it, I literally couldn't tell where he'd hit it. He'd just sort of... rearranged the dents. (And of course his car was fine, because carelessly driven Benzes always are. :) The truck was still working perfectly well when I eventually passed it along to a younger relative who was even poorer than me.
    2
  1189. Let's face it, they'd just break anyway.
    2
  1190. Mike spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder. And everything else.
    2
  1191. It's worth noting that the proximity alarm the tower controller ignored was notorious for giving false positives, and so had pretty much conditioned him and his colleagues to pay it no mind.
    2
  1192. Neat. I used to have a car that was made by (presumably a very different division of) Valmet. They built the convertible versions of the first- and second-generation Saab 900 under contract.
    2
  1193.  @steveurbach3093  The FIG.s alone must have taken months.
    2
  1194. "Duskha" is a fun name, but I think my favorite Soviet weapon name is "ShVAK", because it looks like a sound effect from a Jack Kirby comic from the 1960s.
    2
  1195.  @SvenElven  Soviet pilots also nicknamed the P-39 Airacobra aircraft they got under Lend-Lease "Kobrastochka", which is adorable.
    2
  1196. Tangentially, this gave me the thought: You know how every now and then someone will drop a hype video proposing to build a replica of some golden-age ocean liner (usually Titanic, unsurprisingly), and there's always a CG rendering of the "reborn" ship looking incongruous in a modern-day cruise ship port somewhere? They never show how they plan to incorporate all the radars and satellite antennae and suchlike gubbins a modern ship has to have. I think that's probably an indication of how poorly thought through all of these silly ideas are, as much as anything, but still. I just realized that, and it got me thinking about how it could be done without being too obvious. Modern ships don't have funnels anything like as tall, proportionally, so just jamming all that stuff on the front of the superstructure probably wouldn't work (and it would look terrible anyway)... a designer would have to get very clever, probably with a lot of very expensively customized equipment.
    2
  1197. "What is that, Sledge, a silencer?" "No, it's something my dad invented. It's called a loudener."
    2
  1198.  @snakemain  That should've been a trim level on the Ferrari 458.
    2
  1199. Much like an actual Crusader, he would be largely blind, mostly deaf, virtually immobile if not on horseback, and, after working hard in it for a while on a hot day, in desperate need of two or three well-trained people working as fast as they could to get him out of it before he died from heat exhaustion. :)
    2
  1200. I remember hearing about this at the time, but I could have sworn the plumber it happened to was in Texas. Has this happened to more than one plumber? Or have I just fallen into a memory hole again? (Or a parallel universe. I guess that can't be entirely ruled out. :)
    2
  1201. Fascinating. It's the Metalstorm of the 1850s. High gee-whiz factor, theoretically infinite extensibility, never actually worked or went anywhere.
    2
  1202. I think part of that was because the previous style remained largely unchanged for so long. By the time the GMT400 came along, it was kind of a shock to realize that GM was even allowed to redesign the full-size pickup line. :)
    2
  1203. Here in New England we have a thing called Clamato, which, as the name suggests, is a combination of clam and tomato juices. I have no idea why, but there is a certain temptation to send some along to Scott. If he left it sitting around outside for a while this summer before shooting it, I think he would discover entire new universes of stench.
    2
  1204.  @Squizz11222  Yeah, I was going to suggest the Luftwaffe hypothermia experiments. Doubly problematic in that, unlike this fiasco, they produced results that were actually useful, provoking a debate that still rages today about the ethics of using said results to help people.
    2
  1205. The stretch goal involves shed-built mystery pistols that may or may not be safe. This one was made by a proper factory that had revolutionary things like drawings and quality inspectors. Not really the same thing. :)
    2
  1206.  @rolandthethompsongunner64  Backward, like on an ambulance?
    2
  1207. I knew that name sounded familiar.
    2
  1208. "Up to London" has more to do with the geography of the origins of the rail network than classism. The fact that people in the ancient English university towns always speak of them as being "up" and even London "down" by comparison? That's classist. :)
    2
  1209. I still miss the Hankscraft-Gerber 240 vaporizer we had when I was little. My mom would set it up in my room whenever I was ill, which, since I was an asthmatic child who was also susceptible to nasal infections, was, uh... often. Mind you, it was so good at its job that you had to be careful lest the wallpaper start peeling. That's a thing that happened. A bit strangely, and yet somehow not at all surprisingly, someone has posted a short video here on YouTube just showing one working, sans commentary. https://youtu.be/xEV6q4xpl28
    2
  1210. My only Amtrak experience to date has been a couple of rides on the MBTA Commuter Rail system, which was operated by Amtrak at the time (and may still be, for all I know). One of them was to get from my home in the western outskirts of Boston to the regular T, and thence to a job interview at a company downtown. The other was the ride back home after going through with the interview out of mere politness, because the ride in had convinced me that under no circumstances did I want a job that meant doing that every day. I assume their "proper" services are operated at least a little more competently, but I tell you what, the T's Commie Rail (as it is... affectionately?... known) in the late '90s was the train equivalent of one of those chump-change amusement parks where there are three employees, one doesn't care, and the other two are actively hostile.
    2
  1211. Or a very strange rapper.
    2
  1212. Picturing some Cuban spy sweating profusely and struggling to write down the message fast enough, wondering why on Earth the DGI hired a damn auctioneer to read the numbers.
    2
  1213. There are gas ranges that are set up that way. The one my father put in when he remodeled his kitchen a few years ago has one such burner, which is slightly hilariously labeled TURBO BOIL.
    2
  1214.  @nferraro222  "Work on," hell, some of those old SGIs, you could zap yourself just trying to pick the damn things up.
    2
  1215.  @squirlmy  I have the need to correct typos so deeply ingrained that I am compelled to fix mistyped search terms, even when Google knew what I meant and gave me the results I was after.
    2
  1216.  @Skeppo1  True. What I was addressing was the way you guys are talking like you're trying to decide which one you'd use next week, which is... kinda strange. :)
    2
  1217. To borrow a phrase the comedian John Oliver once applied to Nigel Farage, this guy is a three-time cover model for Punchable Face magazine.
    2
  1218. MORE crazy? How are you not dead?
    2
  1219. "There are things you can't fight. Acts of God. You see a hurricane, you have to get out of the way. But if you're the Hyneman, you can fight the hurricane. You can win."
    2
  1220. What you've described is basically a Gremlins version of the Gummers' basement scene in Tremors, and I'm here for it. "Broke into the wrong goddamn rec room, didn't you, you bastard!"
    2
  1221. It didn't work, though, which I would argue is a more significant measurement of any engineered object's quality than how impressive it is. :)
    2
  1222. The reaction of the Unit 3 supervisor is the most Fallout possible response. "Uh, boss, Unit 4 just blew up and part of the core is on our unit's roof. Shouldn't we get out of here?" "No. Pop some Rad-X and get back to work."
    2
  1223. Psychometry--also a staple of occult and modern-fantasy fiction.
    2
  1224. I feel like there's a buried lede here. Why were you projectile bleeding on a bridesmaid? I mean obviously you lived, but...
    2
  1225.  @ess2870  Oh, so it wasn't your blood. OK. That's a somewhat less alarming mental image. :)
    2
  1226. Are infantry recruits allowed to have forks?
    2
  1227. Heh, whereas my instinctive reaction when I see those old LP antennae in the pics in this video isn't to find them spooky or sinister, it's to think of VHF TV from when I was little. In my hometown, everybody's house had an antenna that looked very much like that (but smaller) back in the day. It was a mark of distinction in my elementary-school days when your parents took theirs down--it meant you got cable. :)
    2
  1228. As I believe the young people say these days, "Weird pivot, but OK." :) (OK, it's more of a tangent than a pivot, and an interesting one at that, but still.) Sadly, the specificity of this subject area does not cover the greatest cigarette packet I personally have ever seen, which was for a South Korean brand called THIS PLUS. They have a truly bonkers cover design including a picture of a whale, a starry sky, and the motto THE SEA HATES A COWARD, which is just... (chef kiss)
    2
  1229.  @rogerjohnson8707  Eh? I'm not calling you out or anything, I'm agreeing with you even though I don't have an Uzi. That's how much I don't want one of these. :)
    2
  1230.  @goawayleavemealone2880  By extension, think about how many times that one thing has gone differently and, as a result, no one ever knew what almost happened... statistically, it must be quite a lot. Eerie.
    2
  1231. Fun fact: the Thompson in the Thompson-LaGarde tests was our old friend John Taliaferro Thompson, later of Thompson submachine gun fame.
    2
  1232. 5:20 "Hello, Bergmann, my old friend; I've come to talk with you again."
    2
  1233. Visit beautiful Almaty! Home of the best hearing-loss clinics in the whole Union.
    2
  1234.  @Panda-cute  The biggest piece crushed a Buick.
    2
  1235.  @Panda-cute  Only the hopes and dreams of its owner.
    2
  1236. I find those wheels... regrettable.
    2
  1237. +somanymods I fear you may be taking the DougScore significantly more seriously than the DougScore takes itself.
    2
  1238.  @talideon  It was either Coronation Street or EastEnders, I can't remember which now.
    2
  1239.  @lepidusthewiser  It's because of the International Date Line.* * (it isn't really)
    2
  1240. This one is particularly fascinating to me, because it lights up (as it were) a lot of old memory fragments that I hadn't thought about in years. Got me properly nostalgic. Many years ago, I had a mid-'60s VW Beetle that had a big red illuminated knob on the dash for the hazard lights. Pull it, and the right turn signals would come on. Then you'd signal a left turn with the stalk, and presto! Four-way hazard flashers. I'm not sure whether that was the intended behavior--I suspect not, as that car had a number of strange electrical habits--but that's how that particular one worked. Also, I remember when I was a kid (back in the days of thermal flashers), it was very common for hooking up trailer lights to cause hyperflashing. I assume that had something to do with the fact that the trailer light connectors were almost always aftermarket and had usually been installed by the owners, who were generally the kinds of guys who thought they knew how to do stuff like that but really didn't. :) Also also, the bit at the end with the Bolt drifting out of phase reminded me of grade-school-age me noticing the fact that the aircraft warning lamps at the tops of the local radio station's AM and FM transmitter towers did that. They would look like they were in sync for a few flashes, then drift into a weird syncopation, then they would seem to be exactly opposed for a while, and so on. Endless fascination, for a child of a certain bent of mind.
    2
  1241. I assume the designers of the AN-94 were out for revenge against those people. :)
    2
  1242. Oh, I remember when this happened. It caused a minor revival of the Reefer Madness moral panic of the 1950s in some quarters, and is one of the reasons why there are now mandatory drug tests even in jobs where being high is of absolutely no consequence to public safety. I seem to recall that there was also a rash of false reports that Unknown Persons had tampered with the track switches, early on before it came out that the crew of one of the trains was impaired, but I might be thinking of a different Northeast Corridor wreck.
    2
  1243. I have a 1001-0 (East German Walther PP clone), and its grips are the same sort of thing. The gun's well-made and looks just like a PP, apart from its almost complete lack of markings, but the grip panels are just slabs of indifferently finished wood. No checkering, no borders, no maker's mark of any kind... just a couple pieces of wood. They don't even look like they came from the same kind of tree. Evidently the workers' and peasants' pistol factory had better things to do. :)
    2
  1244. "Shipping and Handling" Allow four to six weeks for your volley fire to arrive.
    2
  1245. This video made me feel very old, mostly because I don't know what a single one of those musical genres is, except maybe techno. :)
    2
  1246.  @biponacci  This is incredibly inconsistent within Massachusetts itself. Haverhill is pronounced in the English style, as is Worcester (more or less), but nearby Framingham is pronounced like it's spelled (like you're setting up a smoked pork leg to be convicted of a crime it didn't commit), rather than, say, "Framing'm". And then there's Woburn, which is spoken as if it had two Os.
    2
  1247. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." —Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988), in his conclusion to Appendix F of the Rogers Commission report on the loss of space shuttle Challenger, 1986
    2
  1248. In fairness, the actual 1960s SIS probably did things just as slapdash as that all the time.
    2
  1249. It's mildly frustrating that there seems to be zero footage in this video showing the passenger side. I was hoping to see whether the wheels are mirrored. If not, if all four are the same, then the NACA ducts only work on the passenger side when the car is rolling forward. If they are, then it looks like someone put them on the wrong sides at some point, because on the driver's side as currently configured, they'll only pick up air when turning in reverse, which I doubt was the design intent if they're not purely decorative. :)
    2
  1250.  @mojojoji5493  They're facing the wrong way on the driver's side as set up in the video, yes. What I was curious about was whether all the wheels were the same, so that they'd ALWAYS be wrong on one side or the other, or if they're directional and someone put them all on wrong.
    2
  1251. I don't really have a strong opinion one way or the other, but I feel like pronouncing the letters individually makes some sense in parallel with the AT-ST (since pronouncing that "at-sit" just seems silly :).
    2
  1252. Long ago, when thumbing through my grandfather's Shooter's BIble as a kid, I remember not originally realizing that SIG was an acronym, and assuming the company was just named after someone called Sigmund Sauer. I think I still kind of like my version better. :)
    2
  1253.  @Nick_4i  OH YEAAAAAH
    2
  1254.  @Zorglub1966  There was also a Hotchkiss company in Japan that made staplers. They were so ubiquitous in the 20th century, the generic Japanese word for stapler is still a phoneticized form of "Hotchkiss" (ホチキス, hochikisu ) today.
    2
  1255. "I'll bet these cops have got SCMODS." "... 'SCMODS'?" "State-County-Municipal Offender Data System."
    2
  1256. I was going to suggest World War II SMGs, but upon reflection, I like Othais's idea better.
    2
  1257. I remember first seeing the Vector on FutureWeapons with the late Richard Machowicz, ages ago, and thinking "well, that's cool as heck, but no agency is going to buy it, because it looks like it came from a video game." And lo, these many years later, here we are. :)
    2
  1258.  @williamlloyd3769  Right, I get that the company is Japanese-owned, but that's not necessarily the same thing as being owned by the State of Japan. If it's a private concern, I doubt the Japanese government even has any explanation it could offer to the Mauritians.
    2
  1259. Army personnel were also involved in the rescue efforts (as were DC police, firefighters, and any other able-bodied individual who happened to be nearby). Major Patton, as he was at the time, was in overall command of the operation, which, as you might imagine given the circumstances, was extremely thrown-together. (I have not found a source as to why this happened to be the case; it's possible that it was simply because the Army post where he was stationed, Fort Myer, was the nearest command to the incident scene.)
    2
  1260. Like the poet said, any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
    2
  1261. Given that this confrontation went down in greater Wichita, I can't help but picture "Well, let's get to it, fella" leading to a cowboy gunfight in the street out front of the saloon garage.
    2
  1262. Hm. Y'know, I never thought about it before, but yeah, a Frito is basically cornstarch soaked in oil. You're basically eating a little bag of bomb fuses.
    2
  1263. When I reach the end of the conveyor belt of life, I hope I have that guy's level of chill. He lived just long enough to make a joke to the doctors about how they should have set phasers to stun. (I'm not kidding, that happened.)
    2
  1264. There were indeed 20-cm (~8 in) LaserDiscs. They were quite rare and made almost exclusively for the Japanese market, but they did exist.
    2
  1265. I'm just picturing the Craigslist ad that guy answered to get that job.
    2
  1266. In this economy?!
    2
  1267. Webley & Scott (which still exists) had a preorder form for a new production run of the Mk VI on their website for a while, a few years ago. I guess they didn't get enough interest, because it never happened.
    2
  1268.  @jic1  They may have outsourced manufacturing, but that's not the same as a full-on zombie brand.
    2
  1269. 21:50 High--end target pistols' grips are usually custom-carved out of a generic blank for (often by) their owners, so it's likely that Adam is understating the point wildly when he says "small runs". Odds are, the one the prop was based on was the only one of that exact shape.
    2
  1270.  @Pcm979  Ye gods. Ian is Sarah Winchester, confirmed.
    2
  1271.  @patchmack4469  "ǝɯ ʇɥƃıɹ dʃǝɥ ǝsɐǝʃd 'sıɥʇ pɐǝɹ uɐɔ noʎ ɟı"
    2
  1272. "If you want to see me groom a horse..." On a point of order, you're grooming a horse as you say that.
    2
  1273. @MrChopsticktech  It depends on what's in them, but they absolutely can. Containers frequently get lost overboard in storms etc, and often float around for a long time, being hazards to navigation.
    2
  1274.  @vincent67239  Feynman told him he was going to kill himself someday doing that stunt, but noooo, nobody listens to Feynman.
    2
  1275. The DARK button makes me nostalgic for my '97 Saab 900S convertible. To be fair, many things make me nostalgic for my '97 Saab 900S convertible, it was my favorite car I've ever had.
    2
  1276. Remember, kids: Once you pull the trigger, Mr. Bullet is no longer your pal.
    2
  1277. Another possibility is that whoever generated the recordings had a real Bell System switching computer set up in a "sandbox" environment, in which they had full administrative control and could make it "say" whatever they wanted, within the limits of its capabilities. That would have required a pretty well-funded operation--those machines were not cheap--but technologically speaking, it would've been the easiest, least risky way of doing it. The actual voice sounds very authentic to me.
    2
  1278. Visually, if not mechanically, it's a Grease Gun that took a shower and put on an Armani suit.
    2
  1279.  @AnAmericanComposer  It reminds me a little in principle of the marks in movies that signal the approaching end of the reel (although those are meant as a warning to the projectionist, not the audience).
    2
  1280. Don't say that he's hypocritical Say rather that he's apolitical "Once ze rockets are up, who cares vhere zey come down? Zat's not my department," says Wernher von Braun - Tom Lehrer, "Wernher Von Braun" That Was the Year That Was (1965)
    2
  1281. I would have thought the big protruding knob in the underside of the base plate would've been a good clue that it wasn't meant to be put against your leg, but I suppose some people learn better by practical experience. :)
    2
  1282. The rod was operated by a powered mechanism in normal operation. The accident happened while the crew was attempting to reattach the rod to said mechanism, which operated from overhead and required the rod to be lifted slightly past its normal rest position to hook it back onto the rig. That's not a great design either, I grant you, but SL-1 was an experimental design from the dawn of the industry.
    2
  1283. Man, this makes me nostalgic. I remember when international trade was a thing. Good times. Good times.
    2
  1284. "I'm here today at the Thomas Magnum Memorial Backup Gun Match..."
    2
  1285. At last, a worthy competitor to Smill & Wilson of Sprangfeld.
    2
  1286. "Fun" is not generally a military objective, sad to say.
    2
  1287. 7.62 Tokarev.
    2
  1288. Paradoxically, as you get older this phenomenon gets stronger. By the time you get to your fifties you'll almost swear it was last year, two years ago tops.
    2
  1289. Uranium yellow is the best yellow.
    2
  1290.  @rocbolt  "Uranium rainbow" sounds like one of those 1960s euphemisms for some sort of accident involving nuclear material.
    2
  1291. Or possibly the Green Fairy.
    2
  1292. As Gus Grissom put it in The Right Stuff, "No bucks, no Buck Rogers."
    2
  1293.  @mikeblair2594  Everybody called everybody "Comrade" in the Soviet Union. "Mister" was for bourgeois reactionaries.
    2
  1294. "Why carry your weapon when your weapon can carry you?"
    2
  1295. "Something of a hold-my-beer-moment" is going right on the list of favorite phrases.
    2
  1296. To be honest, I'm more excited about the accompanying magic helmet. That could be a real game-changer on the battlefield of tomorrow.
    2
  1297. The missing 60 carbines were sold out of anonymous white wagons parked near college campuses, by salesmen who claimed that they were "accidental overstock" that had to be liquidated quietly before the end of the fiscal year.
    2
  1298.  @TheFrederic888  Every army in history has been optimized to win the previous war.
    2
  1299. Probably weighs about the same, too. :)
    2
  1300.  @AerialTheShamen  They look similar, but the tricorders were custom-built props. Mind you, I used my parents' portable cassette recorder as a tricorder in many, many living room away missions, and I doubt I was the only child to do so. :)
    2
  1301. Long ago, my roommate had a late Pioneer LD player where the tray for the laserdisc was also a five-CD changer carousel. I might be misremembering this part, but I'm pretty sure you could even leave the CDs loaded when you played an LD (but not play the CDs while the LD was in there). I miss that machine, and LDs in general. As an aside, one niche market LDs did hold in the US was collectors of Japanese animation, because LD was so much bigger in Japan and because no heartless beancounter had invented region locking yet. Pioneer even recognized this and released a number of anime titles on LD in English translation for the US market, tiny though it was.
    2
  1302. To be fair, borders are hard! The Soviets always had trouble figuring out where they were supposed to be, I mean, just look at 1945.
    2
  1303. Well, I mean, those railings were installed by the lowest bidder. Not trusting them seems prudent to me.
    2
  1304. Heck yeah. They could put a magnet on it so it clicks into the little airlock recess properly. Pod secured.
    2
  1305. The auto-generated chapter headings think the French fast attack boat at the end is called Allah Combatant, which is the best speech-to-text misread since the chapter heading in the "How Not to Design a Ship" video naming the "Kerningsberg class".
    2
  1306. When drums stop, very bad. When drums stop--bass solo.
    2
  1307.  @AnnaVannieuwenhuyse  I wish they would do that where I live. I'm tired of multi-hour winter outages caused by trees falling on the roadside overhead lines.
    2
  1308. I think it would be absolutely perfect if John Browning really did have that Yosemite Sam accent. :)
    2
  1309.  @planescaped  "It would sound like whales humping or some kind of seismic anomaly. Anything but a submarine."
    2
  1310. The years immediately following the approval of rectangle lights were a hilarious time for car design, because a lot of manufacturers rushed to adopt the newfangled lamps immediately, but didn't bother restyling the cars they put them on past making the headlight enclosures fit the new lamps. The result was a whole generation of weird, awkward-looking cars that were clearly styled to have round headlights, then had square ones put on. For an example, look up a photo of a 1975 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, then compare it to a '76. Not only did GM go from round headlights to rectangular ones without restyling the car, they went from two round ones to four rectangles. Hoo boy.
    2
  1311. To be fair, the Yangtze and devastating floods have been one of the world's iconic duos for thousands of years.
    2
  1312. Heh, I had a black Crown Vic at around the same time, but it was an '89, so it wasn't fooling anybody. :)
    2
  1313.  @skyh  Lots of companies do, it's cheaper than paying their real home countries' tax rates/labor rates/everything-else rates.
    2
  1314. It often is--or, well, if not strictly a typo, definitely an error. Detective fiction, especially in translation, falls victim to Fantasy Gun Syndrome a lot. (In particular, for some reason, the people who translate French police procedurals, e.g., Simenon, seem to think that "revolver" is a synonym for "handgun", as when a character is specifically described as carrying a "Browning 1903 revolver".)
    2
  1315.  @johnanon6938  Given the current state of the art in memes, I was expecting to click "View reply" and find someone saying "Mark Novak would like to know your location."
    2
  1316. "Woman, fetch my fainting couch at once."
    2
  1317. I've got some sympathy for the crew. Yeah, they screwed the pooch, but it reads like this particular pooch was unusually screwable.
    2
  1318. Humans aren't really built to be doing important tasks at night. If we were, we'd have much better low-light vision.
    2
  1319. Everyone's making Fallout: New Vegas references, and all I can think of is that old salsa commercial. "Says here it's from New York City." "New York City?!"
    2
  1320. Neat. That might just edge out my previous favorite latent heat stunt (the water cooling system used on Maxim-type machine guns), just because it's so weird.
    2
  1321. In fairness to the incompetent operator, he was incompetently operating a poorly-designed system with badly devised operating parameters under inept supervision. As is so often the case in these matters, he screwed the pooch, but there were plenty of pooches to go around.
    2
  1322.  @Piotwor  u mad, bro? ... I'm really sorry, I mean, under the circumstances, I had no choice.
    2
  1323. "Vladof! You don't need to be a better shot--you just need to shoot more bullets."
    2
  1324. "I like my rural countryside like I like my women: gorgeous and frigid. Wait, no."
    2
  1325. My father recently turned 70, and has started getting very reminiscent. Every time I see him he tells me a new story about some insanely dumb thing he and his friends did in high school. I'm frankly amazed I exist. Every one of these stories seems like it should end like "... and it took the State Police six hours to find the head."
    2
  1326. Amazingly, this was not the worst outcome to result from the technical procedure of "just jiggle the rods." (glances at the SL-1)
    2
  1327. It's crude oil, which isn't spectacularly useful if you don't own a refinery. Do they have one? (Non-sarcastic question, I don't know.)
    2
  1328. Wow. So it's literally a Cartel Telephone in a plastic box full of water. That's... amazing. (You thought I was going to say "shocking", didn't you?) I've had one of these for a while and have never really trusted it, because of its odd habit of sputtering a lot and spitting out hot water like a malfunctioning radiator, but now I trust it even less. I wish they still made the old Hankscraft-Gerber vaporizer. I think those just used a fan to make the mist, no heating involved. I suppose I could find a vintage one on eBay or some such, but it'd be nice to have one with its motor's entire lifespan before it.
    2
  1329. Yeah, my hometown didn't get 911 (or touch-tone dialing) until I was in high school. Before then, the local fire department used to hand out blaze orange stickers with their phone number all over town. A lot of people had them on their kitchen wall by the phone (note to the cellphone-only generation: phones used to be attached to walls, particularly in the kitchen).
    2
  1330. @Jim Allen OK, so "just as easily" is doing some pretty heavy lifting there, but work with me. :)
    2
  1331. When I had to replace the one that came with my house a few years ago, I went with a range that runs on propane mainly because, at that moment, it was significantly cheaper than the equivalent electric model that was standing right next to it in the store. The notion that one might boil water faster than the other never entered my head. I do also find a gas burner is more fun to run a wok on, but that's just me. TBH, the whole gas-electric controversy feels to me like yet another silly technological holy war. Mac vs. PC for the kitchen. (insert: gif of Ken Watanabe in the 2014 Godzilla. "Let them fight.")
    2
  1332. "It is an expensive pistol, it's a huge pistol, but it is a pistol that, because of its special forces connections... it was a pistol that had a lot of interest from a lot of..." (pause to search for an alternate phrasing of "mall ninjas") "... well, from the US consumer market."
    2
  1333. When I was a kid, my father refused to get a car with air conditioning for years because "it wastes gas." (This was a refreshing change from his usual answer when asked to buy a car with any interesting or convenient feature, which was "it's just one more thing that'll break.") It wasn't until I was in high school that he finally got old enough to concede that not driving around with the windows open, panting for breath in the summer humidity, was in fact not a waste of fuel after all.
    2
  1334. I wonder if maybe Japanese military procurement switched from era dating to Imperial Calendar dating after Emperor Taishō's death because his era was so short. It was only 14 years, shorter than the expected service lifespans of some pieces of equipment (especially those adopted toward the end). Probably hard to know for sure, but it's a thought.
    2
  1335. If I had the kind of money that could support inefficient whimsy on that scale, I'd be tempted to import the German version of the whole car just in the hope that it would say "Sie... haben einen eingehenden Anruf" instead. "Sie haben Ihr Handy im Auto gelassen."
    2
  1336.  @MrJohndoakes  For bonus fun, the Elmyr segment of F for Fake involved de Hory's biographer, Clifford Irving... who went on, after the segments of the film he appeared in were shot but before it was completed, to swindle something like three-quarters of a million dollars out of a big-name book publisher with an "authorized biography" of Howard Hughes that was completely made up. He was only caught when Hughes (who was a paranoid recluse, but not, to Irving's chagrin, divorced from reality) found out and sued the publisher. You can almost taste Welles's glee at how well that whole thing fit into his thesis without having even happened yet when he started making the film. :) (P.S. yes, I know you knew that, you've seen the film; this is more for other readers who haven't)
    2
  1337. "Who are essentially eight guys in an office" has a similar energy to "who is really two kids in a trenchcoat." :)
    2
  1338. Or possibly the one from xXx. "I want all'a that in there."
    2
  1339. I prefer the previous generation myself, but then, I was born in the early '70s, so that was just What New-ish Pickup Trucks Looked Like from when I was born until I was in high school.
    2
  1340.  @yungboicontigo9278  A bit hilariously, GM's internal name for the 1973–1988/91 style was "Rounded Line" (which, to be fair, it kind of is compared to the generation before it).
    2
  1341. "I like this salt because it's not so salty" is a weirdly paradoxical take on the face of it, but I think I get where you're going with it. :)
    2
  1342. You say "mistake", I say "pinnacle". OK, the Oldsmobile looks a bit... Soviet, especially in black, but, I mean, you can't deny it has presence. :)
    2
  1343. Oh, is that why that went away? Huh.
    2
  1344. Fun fact, which I'm sure Jonathan knows, but since he didn't mention it: the M1A1 carbine needed that little bracket for the oiler on the back of the ersatz cheek rest because in the regular M1, that same cylindrical vial is housed in a slot in the wooden buttstock--and does double duty as a sort of retaining pin for the sling, which is also threaded through that slot. Also, I've just remembered a use of those metal crickets from when I was a kid in the '70s--they were part of a game my family had. I think it was the home version of a television game show, possibly Jeopardy! A handful of crickets came with the set to stand in for the electronic buttons contestants on the real thing used to "buzz in" during play. Obviously that's not their original use, since there were no TV game shows in the 1940s, but maybe there was something similar on the radio?
    2
  1345.  Dave Doherty  No--a dirty bomb is a conventional explosive intended to scatter radioactive contaminants. This would still have been a nuclear explosion, just a lot less powerful than the weapon's designed maximum yield. Kilotons rather than megatons.
    2
  1346. I'm not gonna lie, I thought the video title was some kind of comedy reference to Robert Ford, the guy who killed Jesse James. I would never, ever have guessed what it was actually about.
    2
  1347. ♪ I don't want to set the world on fire...
    2
  1348. No, completely different organization. In those days the Army and Navy were separate institutions to a degree that is hard to imagine nowadays.
    2
  1349. Your parents interrupted an Agatha Christie-themed murder.
    2
  1350. /* FIXME: "always has been" meme goes here */
    2
  1351. (cues up the classic Todd Rundgren tune "Emperor of the Highway")
    2
  1352. Fun fact: Those knit covers on the top part of furniture are called "antimacassars". They're so called because they were originally devised to protect the upholstery from a men's hair conditioning product called macassar oil, which was ultra-popular for most of the 19th century. Pretty anachronistic in a Toyota from the 1990s, although who knows, maybe the Yakuza are still into the Wet Look.
    2
  1353. However you pronounce it, it's named after lead ore, which might be a fine name for a mining town, but, I submit, may not be an auspicious name for a ship. :)
    2
  1354.  @P_RO_  This ship was diesel-powered. Marine diesel oil is more viscous than highway diesel, sure, but it's not exactly Bunker C.
    2
  1355. ... OK, hear me out. It's already papered as an SBR, right? So all you'd need to do is put on a bit of rail and then hang a ZiP™ SBR™ attachment on it. This "rifle" then becomes the perfect one-stop shop for the true ZiP™ Operator™.
    2
  1356. I used to have a camper trailer that had a dual-mode fridge--you could run it on electricity or propane, depending on whether you were parked someplace with an electrical supply. I never used the gas mode, because I wasn't into roughing it in undeveloped campgrounds, but it had one, all the same. :)
    2
  1357. Sure, if you could get ammo for it...
    2
  1358. When Ian gets the Magnum, P.I. shirt out of the closet, you know it's going to be a fun video.
    2
  1359. "If you think you know what a Stemple is, write it down on a piece of paper, throw it away, and try not to think about it. You'll be glad you did."
    2
  1360. The shape of that pistol grip is... really something.
    2
  1361. I think this might be the first time I've seen someone use the phrase "dying on the hill" in a conversational sentence and not mean it metaphorically. :)
    2
  1362. Even has the same slam fire problem!
    2
  1363. I don't even have to scroll down to know people are going to be scoffing about this, but I unironically love how much work went into the animations in the gauge cluster. The mode switches are a delight. If I had one of these, I would switch modes occasionally just to watch the gauges transform.
    2
  1364.  @juanar4305  In much the same way that English politicians are never drunk in public, they're Tired and Emotional.
    2
  1365. Getting your head sawed off with a fire hose is nightmare fuel on a level I didn't even realize existed. That's some Final Destination business right there.
    2
  1366.  @WezzleG  This thread is such a mess at this point, I can't tell which of my comments you're replying to.
    2
  1367. @Punished Epstein, A Man Denied His Vengeance That was, indeed, the point. Anyway, it's not like I was neglecting other urgent duties to do it. There ain't a lot else to do in a commercial NOC at 10:30 PM on a Wednesday. :)
    2
  1368. If I ever had a ooat of arms, I would insist on the classical Angry Jägermeister Dog motif, and the pearl-clutchings of the Duke of Norfolk be damned.
    2
  1369. "9mm Yargh" indeed.
    2
  1370. I remember being asked to swap seats with someone who refused to take responsibility for opening the exit door once. My attitude toward it was a little like that lawyer's--in the event of an emergency, no sweat, everyone else can just leave through the me-shaped hole I'll leave in the fuselage--but it would never have occurred to me to D.B. Cooper it at cruising altitude.
    2
  1371. Oh hey, Cougar Ace. Speaking of stability problems...
    2
  1372. The Russians were using the 1895 Nagant by then, although I wouldn't be shocked to find out that they still had S&Ws kicking around. Like the Soviets after them, the Imperial Russian forces had a chronic "more men than guns" problem, and tended not to get rid of anything that could still shoot somebody.
    2
  1373. If you're in Montana and you're anywhere near a paved road, you're doing it wrong.
    2
  1374. I hope handguns in 2199 don't have those super-'80s-a-riffic square trigger guards. That would be the gun equivalent of flared pants coming back. :)
    2
  1375. Enemies of the Emperor. Obviously.
    2
  1376. "Hey, family member, be a pal and set the oven to 400°, willya." Easy! Assuming the family member you addressed doesn't just tell you to do it your damn self, of course. :)
    2
  1377. Glockenspiel, from the German meaning "game of Glocks". :)
    2
  1378.  @alexward1319  Maybe it's just a cheap prop they set up to disguise the real fireplace's incredibly distinctive and valuable carved ebony mantelpiece, by which architectural scholars all over the world would instantly be able to identify the house.
    2
  1379.  @CyberChrist  tabarnak!
    2
  1380.  @nemesis2264  I know they're in games, what I'm saying is that their names also sound like they are games. :)
    2
  1381. Good idea, I keep meaning to do that and never getting around to it. It's required by law in some places--notably France, where the fact that everyone who had a car already had a hi-vis vest made possible the slightly odd signature of the gilet jaune ("yellow vest") protests.
    2
  1382. I'd just like to note a small inaccuracy in this video: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does not, as depicted, hold violators at gunpoint with Lugers to collect financial penalties. It's all Glocks these days.
    2
  1383. The photograph at 13:09 is particularly chilling. That gentleman looking back toward the camera has seen some shit.
    2
  1384. Fisher's engineers sandbagged the P-75 project big-time, because the company's management wanted to get out of having to build aircraft. What better way than to be terrible at it?
    2
  1385. Either that, or it makes the car laugh hysterically and kill you. Which would be in character for most Porsches, I'm told. :)
    2
  1386.  @andrewtaylor940  Paper, too. Even though it involves so much water, papermaking creates a lot of dust, and papermakers know if it's allowed to build up in the corners and attics of mill buildings, they're going to go up someday.
    2
  1387.  @thanatos454  Now that you mention it, I did see the same cat cross the hallway twice in the same direction just before this video dropped.
    2
  1388. See also: the 1967 horror film Attack of the The Eye Creatures.
    2
  1389. ... Can you really say the Cobray Terminator was "designed", though? I mean... it's a pipe.
    2
  1390. As Victor Borge teaches us, the only difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer.
    2
  1391.  @neuralmute  Or those guys in Texas who stole the gamma ray cameras.
    2
  1392. I'm not a German armorer, but now that I've seen this, there is a part of me that is crying because it knows I'll never own one.
    2
  1393. I feel bad for RIA's UPS guy come Monday.
    2
  1394.  @wallaroo1295  Yeah, it's just that there are liable to be a lot of them today. :)
    2
  1395. It's an English car, so "reheat", surely. :)
    2
  1396. It's also described as a "folding sniper's rifle", when it is demonstrably not two of those things, and only barely the third. :)
    2
  1397. And now we know the real reason Radio Shack was driven out of business! #TinfoilHatModeEngaged
    2
  1398.  @TheGrammargestapo1  "I'm not a psychopath. I'm a high functioning psychopath."
    2
  1399. It reminds me slightly of a CZ Kadet, if the function of a CZ Kadet was to change a CZ 75 into The Lahti L-35 We Have at Home. :)
    2
  1400.  @holysirsalad  It happens even without those pressures, though. Pushing the button again seems to be just part of human nature.
    2
  1401. After "Tim Burton's Batman is FINE..." Tim Burton, wherever he is, is probably experiencing internal bleeding and has no idea why.
    2
  1402. There already is a Yugo of AKs, though--literally! The M70, made by Zastava right there in beautiful Kragujevac, just like the cars. :)
    2
  1403. I'm not sure which is bothering me more, the welds or the fact that that electrical outlet is installed upside down (and not even square). :)
    2
  1404. Upon rewatch: It's definitely the outlet.
    2
  1405. On a point of order, you don't have to be British to get Upstairs, Downstairs references; it was aired on American public television.
    2
  1406. One of the little enduring mysteries of my collection is why my 1918 SMLE Mk III* still has its stacking swivel, when I've read in multiple references that they were removed from the rifles that survived the Great War immediately thereafter.
    2
  1407. Somewhere around here, I have a decommissioned library book entitled How to Install and Repair Your Own Telephones. It doesn't seem so impressive now--it's not a very large book, and it covers a technology that is now, if not completely obsolete, at least extremely obsolescent--but it's important to keep in mind that when this book was published in the 1940s, this was forbidden knowledge to anyone outside the Bell System priesthood. Someone probably risked significant legal complications to publish it.
    2
  1408.  @marcjtdc  There's a scene in Blue Chips, the '90s movie about corruption in college basketball, where Bob Cousy's character shoots free throws while talking to Nick Nolte's character. Throughout the entire scene, which IIRC is a single long shot, Cousy hits every single time. Eventually Nolte asks him, "Don't you ever miss?" That wasn't scripted. :)
    2
  1409.  @avlawns3037  To be fair, he was long dead by the time the company end-of-lifed this particular product.
    2
  1410.  @NoNameAtAll2  YouTuber musician, notorious in his fandom for staring into the camera as if it owes him money and he wants it to know he's still not over Macho Grandé.
    2
  1411. Shouldn't be a problem--standing in for the OG is exactly what those substitute powders are designed for. (Cue wildly exaggerated horror stories from the diehards here.) Some are reputed to be more corrosive than the original, but given how corrosive black powder is anyway, the difference is kind of academic. This part is just a surmise, but given that actual black powder is pretty hard to come by nowadays, at least in North America (it's much less stable to transport and store than modern propellants), it's likely they're using a substitute in this video.
    2
  1412.  Dave Jones  Yep.
    2
  1413.  @f-s-r  Won't be long before they keep your health insurance company up to date on your habits while they're at it.
    2
  1414.  @pj7415  I once had a chemistry professor who reassured the class on the first day by saying, "There won't be a lot of math in this course. I'm an organic chemist by trade, so I can only count to eight anyway. ... None of you are getting that joke right now, but you will when I'm finished with you." True story!
    2
  1415. To be fair, authors rarely are given the opportunity to design the covers of their own books, or sometimes even to title them. Publishers have Ideas about these things.
    2
  1416. "This can be black." - knife customer
    2
  1417. Everyone's jumping on the Dirty Harry references bandwagon, but I look at this thing and I see Ash from Army of Darkness. "LIsten up, you primitive screwheads! This is my boom stick! "
    2
  1418. "True... from a certain point of view." - Obi-Wan Kenobi
    2
  1419. Ah, OK, I was puzzled by that. "Black gang" is also sailor slang for the engine room crew (dating back to when they shoveled coal), but the phrasing didn't make sense, since surely that type of black gang would have been aboard already.
    2
  1420. "Don't be mad at me in the tub, OK?" "F the tub, I'm mad at you RIGHT HERE!"
    2
  1421. "And you, sir, are a formidable opponent!"
    2
  1422.  @DieBlauenSeiten  Here in the States we have a similar kind of gadget, but we usually display them in things like office and shop windows if we have to leave during the day, set to the time when we expect to be back.
    2
  1423. Of course it was a gasoline tanker. Couldn't have been a milk tanker, or a truck hauling a load of pillows or marshmallows...
    2
  1424. The rest of your argument is sound, but as regards storing the records on a computer, keep in mind that it was 1980. Texaco probably owned one computer, and it was busy tabulating accounts receivable or something.
    2
  1425. To me the most frustrating thing about this kind of accident is, since the whole "escape room" thing is make-believe anyway, there's no earthly reason for the doors to be really locked in the first place. Hell, the walls don't even have to be real, at least the interior ones. They might as well be paper printed to look like real walls, so that in the event of an emergency, the customers can just Kool-Aid Man their way to safety.
    2
  1426. I'm not sure I'm warped enough to have a favorite nuclear near-miss, but I guess if I had to name one it'd have to be the Stanislav Petrov incident, because, you know. Lone guy saves the world and all.
    2
  1427.  @jalpat2272  True.
    2
  1428. Headstamp's books go on more general sale after the Kickstarter process is finished (stock permitting)--if you check out https://www.headstamppublishing.com/purchase, you can see what they're currently offering. There's also a physical mailing address on the website's contact info page. This particular book isn't available there now, because they haven't actually made them yet (that's what the Kickstarter is for), but it presumably will be someday. Disclaimer: I am, alas, not affiliated with Headstamp Publishing or Forgotten Weapons in any way, I just felt like trying to be helpful.
    2
  1429. Huh. I could swear I remember reading somewhere (Ezell, maybe? my copy is in storage while my living room gets remodeled, or I'd check) that it was called the HSc because the version that went into production was preceded by two unsuccessful prototypes designated HS (retroactively HSa) and HSb. I've got one of these, seems to be civilian, early enough that it still has its lanyard hole; it has synthetic grips, which I've never seen on any other one. They look just like the factory wood ones on all the examples in this video and others I've seen in photos, same checkering layout and everything, but they're black plastic (or Bakelite, or maybe hard rubber--not wood, anyway).
    2
  1430. "Sure, I mean, 'White Punks On Dope' is an all-time classic, man..."
    2
  1431. "Stop whining and just let the bastards get away with it" is an... interesting view to take of malfeasance.
    2
  1432.  @grafando  That wasn't just for a heat pump (which wouldn't be much use by itself in this climate), it was for replacing the existing boiler with a propane-fired one as well as a supplemental heat pump for the first floor.
    2
  1433. Lots of guns have an external safety, but I've never heard of one before where the safety was a completely separate piece.
    2
  1434. I like to picture the people in charge of Smith & Wesson (not sure whether that was still Messrs. Smith and Wesson at the time) pouring themselves a celebratory Scotch and ceremoniously firing up cigars the size of kielbasa as the president of the Rube-of-the-Month Club left their office with his "we get almost all the profits, and YOU get to spend all your time and money in court" contract in hand.
    2
  1435. My first grown-up job was doing PC tech support for a (now-long-defunct) subsidiary of Daewoo Telecom. I can only hope that Daewoo Precision Industries Ltd. has higher quality control standards. :)
    2
  1436.  @nunyabeeswax2575  Given that Jones was reminiscing about the Battle of Omdurman, which took place only a few months after the Magazine Lee-Enfield entered service, he might well have been talking about a Martini bayonet. Depends on how well-supplied his unit was, I suppose. :)
    2
  1437. There used to be a gun shop in my area that had a decommissioned Maxim gun for sale. It had a sign on it that said something to the effect of, "Doesn't work, but will look amazing in your breakfast nook."
    2
  1438.  @ravencrestmedia  Good old Klaus. He meant well!
    2
  1439. It's always morning someplace. :)
    2
  1440.  @deusexaethera  Or the ceiling above the charging pad.
    2
  1441. On a point of order, none of these guns is accurate-looking... oh... wait, no. That's not what you meant. Never mind! :)
    2
  1442.  @Scaevola9449  The Steyr M family suggests they would at least be interesting-looking plastic boxes.
    2
  1443. I similarly gifted an A-2 jacket I had, uh, outgrown to a college friend many years ago, and though I haven't seen him that often in the intervening decades, every time I have he's been wearing that jacket. It makes me obscurely happy.
    2
  1444. Yeah, that happens more than the maritime industry would like to admit. Sometimes ships just go rogue. No one's really sure why it happens--possibly just boredom.
    2
  1445. I'm going to miss seeing absurdly expensive cars reviewed in front of that random warehouse alley wall with the bricked-over ground-floor windows. :)
    2
  1446. Those guys rock the best cover of "Jessie's Girl" you ever heard, son.
    2
  1447.  @jadeorbigoso5212  Kaga was a battleship; she and Akagi weren't sisters.
    2
  1448.  @Marci124  Road wheels from Panzer III and IV kits, I think. They're all over the Millennium Falcon model, among others.
    2
  1449. "This is a fascinating little gadget. It's gonna replace CDs soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White Album again."
    2
  1450. Wasn't part of MacGyver's whole shtick that he hated guns and refused to have anything to do with them, though?
    2
  1451. "Not that we needed all of that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can."
    2
  1452.  @Qardo  Imagine the war cabinet meeting. "Prime Minister Tōjō, Australia is within our grasp." "That's great, Admiral, but consider: Do we really want Queensland?" "Ooh, good point."
    2
  1453. Why would anyone consider a full auto rifle with such a large cartridge? (Don't try to hide behind the curtains, M14, I'm looking at you too.)
    2
  1454. This kind of thing is why I don't put much faith in that whole "how do we mark waste sites so future civilizations won't mess with them?" project. We can't mark them so members of the current civilization won't mess with them, how can we hope to get the message across to the roachmen of the 455th century? Even if they figure out how to read the text, they're just going to be like, "'This is not a place of honor. Nothing of value is kept here.' Yeah right! Larry, get the sawzall."
    2
  1455.  John Doe  Look, if you're going to call someone a microcephalic addlepate, at least know the word microcephalic.
    2
  1456. My mother still tells fond childhood stories about the Government Cheese, which evidently continued to be a thing well into the 1950s.
    2
  1457. And the OTHER other half is the Model 8.
    2
  1458. "Sergeant Benton! The lizardy-looking chap, five rounds, rapid."
    2
  1459.  @onpsxmember  No, it's there because just "gryphon" was taken on an IRC server circa 1993. :)
    2
  1460. "It shoots through schools." - Danny Vermin, Johnny Dangerously (1984)
    2
  1461.  @bwofficial1776  Well, I admit my sample size is 1, but if it's the one I had, you could do that just fine, as long as you budgeted a fair amount of time to work on it in the parking lots of parts stores under the sign that says not to work on your car in the parking lot of the parts store. :) Nothing ever went catastrophically wrong on it (until the frame rusted out), but it did like to stop working a lot. It had a particular affinity for electrical faults.
    2
  1462. John-Paul Silke Items 1 and 3 on your list are the same thing, even, because that's how humanity rolls.
    2
  1463. What a terrifyingly on-the-nose name for a ship responding to a mass casualty incident.
    2
  1464. "No, Officer, this is not a 'Black Rifle'. As you can clearly see, it's brown."
    2
  1465. Surely that shirt technique is more of a Lamborghini-owner thing? This car seems more like it's for the "vest, tie, and dress shirt, but a three-day beard on purpose, cargo shorts, and chukkas" set.
    2
  1466. I (cup) Cupholders, surely.
    2
  1467. In his memoir A Life On the Road, the late Charles Kuralt wrote that in his early days working in the still-experimental television department of CBS in the 1950s, he and the rest of the news writers used to have to cross the station from their office to the broadcast studio across that catwalk every weekday before the CBS Evening News went out--usually in a huge hurry, because they would've been working on the script up until the very last minute.
    2
  1468.  Waggsmith YTP  I had one, that's what made me think of it.
    2
  1469. It's maddeningly fashionable nowadays for employers to behave as though only doing the type and amount of work you're getting paid to do during the hours you're paid to do it is some kind of sabotage. They even have a snide little phrase for it, "work to rule," as if it's some kind of moral equivalent of building things to minimum code.
    2
  1470. Captain Haddock mode. "Visigoths! Bashi-bazouks! Anacoluthons!"
    2
  1471. Also, they can't see out.
    2
  1472.  @evilkillerwhale7078  Well, put 20 scientists in a room, and they'll come out with 40 opinions about nomenclature. :)
    2
  1473. To be fair, in those days, if you were poor, you wouldn't be looking at an autoloader at all. Probably not even a manual repeater.
    2
  1474. The Fiat 500 in the '60s Gulf racing livery was a truly inspired deco choice.
    2
  1475. Have you seen 28 Days Later ? Basically that.
    2
  1476. "Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can." - Hunter S. Thompson
    2
  1477. I've seen so many writeups and documentaries about engineering and transportation disasters and their outcomes at this point that my automatic thought was, "Well, at least this time the captain bought it." That probably makes me a bad person, but oh well.
    2
  1478.  @BubblewrapOracle  Fantômas is a very similar sort of thing, only French. :)
    2
  1479. To be completely fair to K-7, torpedoes doing the square root of f-all was far from uncommon in not only the First, but also the Second World War. They were frail and finicky weapons at the best of times. Anyway, what's funniest to me about the saga of the K-boats is that, Lord Fisher's prediction notwithstanding, lots of present-day submarines are steam-powered. Of course, their water is boiled by nuclear reactors, which is something Fisher could probably never even have imagined, but still! The propulsion tech itself is perfectly sound; the problem is the heat source. :)
    2
  1480. In a pinch, you could probably also round up four of them and stake down a tent.
    2
  1481. And it wouldn't have gone any farther, except he happened to mention it to his friend who was good with tools.
    2
  1482. @A real bisexual petrol-head I... didn't complain about them in cars either. What the actual? This is the most bizarre attempt to start a fight I've ever seen, but, uh, I guess you do you, sport. "I don't understand a word you say, but I will defend to the death your right to confuse me." - Benjamin Franklin Pierce, MD
    2
  1483. Ha! I've long assumed those things were a manufacturing artifact, but I was never quite bothered about it enough to find out. I'll tell you an off-label use of them I absolutely hate, though, and that's when manufacturers of electrical things ship things with a zip-tie fastened through those holes for no evident reason, so that you can't unpack the product and... you know... use it without going and getting a pair of wire cutters. Packaging that requires tools to remove is one of my pet peeves in general, and that particular manifestation really forces my lute.
    2
  1484. Plus, a 1903 Springfield is a "short" rifle by the standards of its time, but I would contend it's still too long to be really credible as a carbine, pistol-caliber conversion or no.
    2
  1485. Or even some blue Loctite.
    2
  1486.  @canadabear72  The only place named "Sorento" with one R that I could find in a quick web search was a town in Illinois. With two Rs it's a town in Italy, a bunch of towns in the US and Canada that are probably named for the town in Italy, and a brand of cheese. And a baseball player.
    2
  1487. Some museums and collections--such as this one--insist on it.
    2
  1488.  @18Hongo  Well, you know how car ferries have those big doors at the front for the cars to drive in? The Herald left port without closing them. Seriously, that happened. The doors didn't break or suffer a mechanical failure or open uncommanded because of some kind of electrical fault, or anything like that. The crew just... forgot to close them, didn't bother checking, and then tried to sail away. This is, as Bill Bryson once described it, like forgetting to take your shoes off before getting in the bathtub, but the crew of the Herald somehow managed to do it.
    2
  1489.  @diff9646  ... Not on an SD-shaped screen, you can't.
    2
  1490.  @iwontliveinfear  The kid who came to try and repair my old one stared at its guts like James Bond trying to figure out how to disarm the nuke in Goldfinger: completely bewildered and on the edge of panic. Which is why I had to get a new one. :)
    2
  1491. BTW, the Senator John Glenn who got involved with the investigations: he was that John Glenn. First American in orbit, last Mercury astronaut standing... that guy.
    2
  1492. Seeing Jonathan take a modern two-handed grip on this thing gave me a real giggle.
    2
  1493. "Steel frame, steel slide, oof." If they were still selling these, they could use that as the strapline for a new ad campaign. :)
    2
  1494. Well, that's exactly who's going to buy this car, so maybe it's an Easter egg. :)
    2
  1495. Based on the very distinctive tones, it seems clear that the Three-Note Oddity was operated by the American Telephone & Telegraph Corporation.
    2
  1496.  @derekkwok8838  And the less said about Rimingtown the better...
    2
  1497.  @Adlerwacht  typo
    2
  1498.  @igrim4777  You're sort of both right. The design originated with a military cargo aircraft project that ended up being dropped before reaching the prototype stage. A while later, when Juan Trippe came shopping for a giant airliner, Boeing dusted off that abandoned freighter design and reworked it into the 747 we know.
    2
  1499. I feel like Nambu's pistols don't get the respect they deserve. Yes, they're weirdly overcomplicated and have some weak features; yes, the ammunition is not very impressive. But this was one of the earliest self-loading service pistols, home-grown in a country that had been industrialized for less than 40 years.
    2
  1500. The plot of one of the Tom Swift Jr. novels from the 1950s, Tom Swift and his Atomic Earth Blaster, involved Tom drilling to the Earth's core using the eponymous Earth Blaster. IIRC, he did this not for scientific research into the composition of the planet or to tap geothermal energy (who the hell needed geothermal energy in the '50s? As the title suggests, we had atoms for that!), but because it was an almost unlimited source of pure iron. Why that was important I've long since forgotten, having read the book when I was about 10, but I think of it every time I hear about this project or Project Mohole (the American equivalent, which didn't get nearly as far but had a much better name).
    2
  1501. OK, hear me out: this crackle paint on the metal parts of a Glock.
    2
  1502. Given how expensive Thompson guns are, it doesn't have to be a poor man's Thompson gun, just a less rich man's Thompson gun. :)
    2
  1503. I feel like there was a missed opportunity to say "Sorry if this story was a little crude, but hey, ship happens." :)
    2
  1504. Just being berthed in water and not... whatever's in the Houston Ship Channel... will be a big help.
    2
  1505. Also: the International Harvester Scout. In production from 1961 to 1980, at which point it only went out of production because International got out of the passenger vehicle business altogether as part of a restructuring.
    2
  1506. why, they couldn't hit an elephant at this dist
    2
  1507.  @LoganC1988  NOW how much would you pay?
    2
  1508. Yeah, see, the point there is that M-B is still selling the G-Wagen. For vast amounts of money.
    2
  1509. The detail that always catches my eye is that single-volume Lovecraft collection at the lefthand end of the second shelf. I have the same edition. It's kind of silly, but it always tickles me when someone speaking with a bookshelf in the background has a random book that I recognize from my own library. :)
    2
  1510.  @broodlyric  To be fair, it's a slightly bigger commitment than Brussels sprouts.
    2
  1511. I fear you underestimate the resourcefulness of dachshunds. :)
    2
  1512.  @michaelvandyne6480  Nah. That'll never catch on.
    2
  1513. Well, I mean, she was queen of England. It's just that she was also queen of a number of other places as well.
    2
  1514. "Fear not, Pinky. The unwieldy atomic weight of gold shall not be an impediment to my next plan."
    2
  1515. I've got a Bolo that's a complete parts bin special, which I wouldn't mind if they were mismatched working parts, but alas, they are not. Mind you, the guy I got it from threw it in for free with a Webley Mk IV I was buying, so we both knew it didn't work, but when it later turned out not to be fixable, that was a bit of a disappointment.
    2
  1516. Meh, early airbag attempts. What can ya do.
    2
  1517. This gun was made for a special international strike force that was put together to battle the Many-Angled Ones. It works normally in their universe, not ours.
    2
  1518. I had a similar experience, except I would guess I'm about 15 years older, because the device in question was, I kid you not, a U-Matic machine.
    2
  1519. These gentlemen somehow invented something even worse than a BLEVE: a BLERVE (boiling liquid expanding radioactive vapor explosion). Respect. (Also, what sort of maniacally twisted mind even came up with that refining process in the first place?! Twenty thousand or so steps and not one of them is intuitive. Chemists, man. They're not like other people.)
    2
  1520.  @brunoprimas1483  That must be what it was, then. I'm pretty sure the person who showed it to me had one of those as well as an Odyssey. (He was very into synthesizers of that period generally.)
    2
  1521.  @frankanderson5012 , have you heard the tale of Darth Plagueis the Wise? It's said he was so powerful that he could use exaggeration for comic effect.
    2
  1522.  @rhetoric5173  Oh, you know. Sudden holes, blood loss, death. That kind of thing.
    2
  1523. Note: Among gun folks, probably the best-known Carl-with-a-C from prewar Germany would be Carl Walther (1858-1915).
    2
  1524.  @ogalief  Yeah, I dunno. Maybe the two-position ones are the only kind available at Small Appliance Factory No. 724 or wherever.
    2
  1525. With the best will in the world, saying "There are guns that are more comfortable, perhaps," about the PPS is like looking at a battleship and saying, "There are boats that are smaller, perhaps." :)
    2
  1526. Please do whatever you can to ensure that it makes the correct sound effect. I very much want my doctor of the future to wave the little wibbly device at me and tell me I have the Denebian flu.
    2
  1527. I have a couple of old-fashioned four-foot fluorescent tube lights on my (enclosed, but unheated) front porch. They're handy for gauging how cold it is out at night in the winter. If I flip the switch by the door and the porch lights are slow and flickery, it must be below freezing. If they don't come on at all, I know it's at least 10 below zero F out there. :)
    2
  1528. The Atlantic also has a video on their YT channel about Verrückt. It includes what feels like TV-documentary footage of Jeff Henry during the ride's construction, blithely speaking to camera about how he'd consulted numerous engineers and what he called "mathematicians" (probably engineering physicists) about the design... and then ignored every single one of them on the grounds that "they all got it wrong," by which he meant they all told him the concept of the ride was insane and, if built, it would inevitably kill someone. (That same video includes footage of Henry and his crew laughing uproariously at one of the testing crashes, with Henry remarking gleefully to the effect of, "We killed every single sandbag on that one!")
    2
  1529. That importer mark is... unfortunate.
    2
  1530.  @Gameprojordan  As an aside, I'm not sure whether to compliment you on your choice of name/userpic or bill you for the therapy I'm going to have to get now that I've been reminded of that particular Saturday morning PSA from my childhood. :)
    2
  1531. Going back through some earlier videos, I've been amused by the realization that you can sort of vaguely date Forgotten Weapons videos from the first few seconds. - Does it start with machine gun fire? no - OK, it's not one of the really early ones. Does it have theme music? no - OK, newer still. Does Ian say his last name? no OK, then it's not one of the very newest ones. Analysis complete. This video is: semi-recent
    2
  1532. There are two entirely tangential details in this piece that particularly grab my attention. One is that Herbert Hoover had trouble with the logistics of organizing the first Big Game, which is funny because he went on to be world-famous for his skill at organizing huge undertakings (such as the humanitarian relief efforts in Belgium after World War I and the U.S. government's response to the massive Mississippi River floods of 1927). He was so well-known and respected for such works that he was elected President of the United States in 1928 in a landslide despite an almost total lack of personal charm or actual political ability. The other is the score. How the hell does a football game end with a score of 5–0?
    2
  1533. And all of those plastic filler panels between the fenders and bumpers, many of which have now disintegrated and left weird-looking gaps on the surviving cars of that era...
    2
  1534. I love that the test slabs were visibly made in disposable baking pans. :)
    2
  1535. Oh hey, I didn't know the UK had that "let's blow through the biggest pile of venture capital we can swing as fast as humanly possible and leave absolutely everybody below the executive suite in the lurch" phase too. I ended up working for at least three such companies in the US in that era. So many worthless stock options...
    2
  1536. The streetlight outside my house did that for, like... five years, which tells yoiu something about the maintenance priority this area has with whatever agency is responsible for that kind of thing.
    2
  1537. Fascinating. I never heard of this before--I guess it was a little bit after my time. Certainly a great example of doing more with less, electronics-wise. It's probably just as well they didn't exist when I was a child. I could easily picture my nerdy child self getting obsessive about reverse-engineering the game codes. This is in no way a demand, but if this were to turn out to be the on-ramp to a series of videos looking at the electronic toys and edutainment devices of the transistor era (Merlin, Speak & {Spell|Read|Math}, et al), I would... not be bothered by that. :)
    2
  1538. Not with that stock. :)
    2
  1539. I think a big part of the reason why the Titanic sinking is so much better-remembered now than that of Empress is simply down to the fact that Titanic was a much more famous ship in the first place. Empress of Ireland was a sizeable vessel, but still only about 3/5 the size of Titanic, and she had been in service for eight years with a line that was lesser-known outside the markets it served. By contrast, Titanic belonged to one of the most prominent steamship lines in the world at the time, sank on her maiden voyage with dozens of famous people aboard, and had been hyped to the hilt in the international press before she ever set sail. I'm not arguing that one tragedy was more worthy of remembrance than the other, it's not a competition--just pointing out the historical context. Sometimes it's hard to say why one event is better-remembered than another, but I don't think this is one of those times.
    2
  1540. To be fair, Admiral Scott's career was going fine before Admiral Callaghan's flagship accidentally murdered him.
    2
  1541. Thirty years on, I still remember being sent to the principal's office from my senior-year high school psychology class one day for taking, and vigorously defending, a position best summarized as "all behaviorists can f*ck off" in a discussion of B.F. Skinner. I remain unrepentant.
    2
  1542. At least it's pronounced more or less how it's spelled, as opposed to, say, Featherstonehaugh.
    2
  1543. Monty Python teaches us that vicars like that sort of thing most of all.
    2
  1544. We have always been at war with Loarmia.
    2
  1545. They're the same thing...
    2
  1546.  @oldbatwit5102  Major Boothroyd ("the Armorer" in the movie, not the real-life letter writer) and Q were meant to be the same character, but the role became much more colorful when Desmond Llewelyn took it over in From Russia With Love.
    2
  1547. To be fair, a PPK would also look puny in Bond's hands--which is why the prop gun the actors say is a PPK is really a PP. :)
    2
  1548.  @Ogaitnas900  Yes--the PP (short for Polizeipistole, "police pistol") is the first model. The PPK is a smaller version, originally developed to be issued to detectives.
    2
  1549. Fair point about the recoil, that hadn't occurred to me for some reason. Guess I didn't spend long enough thinking over the problem before commenting--it was an idle bit of curiosity that came to mind toward the end of the video. As for failure to cycle, I must still have had Ian's remarks about revolvers on my mind. (Subsonic vs. supersonic didn't either, but in that case, just because it never crossed my mind that a person would be shooting supersonic ammunition with a suppressor. What would be the point of subjecting the suppressor to that much wear and tear when it's going to make a loud noise regardless?) Ah, well. A coward would delete the comment, but I shall leave it as an enduring monument to human fallibility. :)
    2
  1550. 15:30 Wow. That is some bad mill work on the side of that receiver. Learn to set your speed and feed, unknown long-dead British Raj factory machinist!
    2
  1551. all the Federales say / they could have had him any day / they only let him go so long / out of kindness, I suppose
    2
  1552. OK, that was a little mindbending. I thought that museum logo was painted on the wall behind Ian, until he reached over and it stayed in front of his arm...
    1
  1553. I cracked up at "This dude was heeled."
    1
  1554. Every time I see the bookshelf in the background, I remember that I need to replace my copy of The Sword and the Shield, then forget it again by the time the video is over. This time I'll be smart and pause it long enough to go order one.
    1
  1555. I love how the makers of shotguns that are plainly intended for combat think that if they put "sporting" in the name, the ATF won't notice and everything will be fine. :) (This, the SPAS, there are probably others I'm not thinking of right now...)
    1
  1556. Two-fisted space-travelling British gentlemen of the alternate 1890s, your sidearm has arrived.
    1
  1557. I came for the technical details, but I stayed for all the snarky piss-taking of Elite Tactical-Mindedness. :)
    1
  1558. Very late to the party, I know, but: riveting stuff, energetically presented. It feels weird to say that I'm looking forward to the rest of the war, but... Also, because this is The Internet, obligatory nit: I believe it's pronounced "shpay". :)
    1
  1559. +The Great War Well, not "shpee", either way. :)
    1
  1560. 3:37 took me slightly aback. I'm not a hater like some of the other commenters here, but I have to admit, when I think "Stockholm" the next thing that springs to mind is not "1932 Ford highboy". Well played, unknown Swede! :)
    1
  1561. I'm not sure what firing a revolving rifle/shotgun feels like, but I suspect it must be like an even worse version of the unpleasantness that is shooting a traditional sidelock longarm (flint or percussion) left-handed. Ouch.
    1
  1562. Dakota Kelley-Greenleaf 50% red lasers, 50% blue lasers.
    1
  1563. The opening reminded me of that... I can't remember what it was called, that police shotgun with the semi-built-in flashlight. The one Ian had to take apart to get to work, and then it almost immediately broke down again.
    1
  1564. Seems like the spent brass is a little bit of a problem, although I suppose an actual German police sniper would probably have a menial to deal with such petty annoyances for him.
    1
  1565. A Gyrojet turns up in the first of those silly 1980s James Bond novels by the late John Gardner. Since it's a 1980s James Bond novel, the projectile naturally blows a hole the size of an LP record in some poor sap. Because ROCKETS.
    1
  1566. That barrel mounting system would present... certain problems with an actual firearm. But then so would the lack of any sort of breech mechanism. But hey, Space Rifle. :) (Which is why real rifles tend to have those bands on them, of course.)
    1
  1567. "Why are you dodging? They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." - Gen. John Sedgwick (Sept. 13, 1813 - May 8, 1864), speaking too soon on May 8, 1864
    1
  1568. +Pete Brown I'm kind of wondering how he manages not to end up with paint all over everything, just spray painting in the middle of the room like that. It's like a magic trick.
    1
  1569. My extensive Terror from the Deep experience compels me to note that these things are pretty much useless against any alien tougher than a Gill Man.
    1
  1570. The same Karl August Brauning who is thought to have actually designed the "Ortgies' patent" pistol? What a small world inter-war European firearms design was!
    1
  1571. Ironically, one thing a semiauto DPM can be expected to have is reduced DPM.
    1
  1572. Imperial Japanese "interservice rivalry" = the only enemies the IJA and IJN hated more than the Allies were each other.
    1
  1573. RonJohn63 Yep, the Tirol is the Tirol, national boundaries notwithstanding. :)
    1
  1574. You may find what you seek in this one: https://youtu.be/Rk-pISvud6w
    1
  1575. The note about how some of these entered the country legitimately, and others not so much, makes me wonder how deep in the shit one could find oneself if one unwittingly bought the latter kind. The ATF is not renowned for an institutional tendency to let things slide on good faith, after all.
    1
  1576. I made it as far as the guy saying "put as much smarts as we could in the cloud" in a totally natural tone of voice. Nobody who's that unabashedly fluent in Marketese gets any more of my neurons.
    1
  1577. +Vince Pelcat On the plus side, the Remington Model 8 basically was an Auto-5 rifle. Same long-recoil action, very similar profiles. Very popular in its day. So, you were closer than you thought! :)
    1
  1578. That third gun in the "we're not going to talk about these" disclaimer looked like a Ruger .22 as it would've been depicted on a 1950s science fiction book cover. I now want one very much, which is unfortunate. ETA: I love that the 1904 Webley is so enormous that it blocks out the date marker in the upper left. :)
    1
  1579. +hblu Agreed - taking ANY rifle into WWI is a bit like playing Global Thermonuclear War. A strange game; the only way to win is not to play.
    1
  1580. Hmm. Sometime between the Alien Spacesuit video and this one, that convex mirror got broken. I'm always going to wonder about that now...
    1
  1581.  @zacharyrollick6169  They probably looked at it for a while and realized that if they complicated it, they would just end up turning it back into a Borchardt.
    1
  1582. Hmm, interesting. I've got a Croatian PHP (redundant, I know) that's that color, I always assumed it was because it was browned rather than blued.
    1
  1583. Interesting. With a rate of fire that slow, what was the actual advantage of full auto for these in the first place? I mean, at four rounds per second, it seems like someone with a little experience could fire it just as fast in semiauto mode. At that point you're basically just saving the gunner some trigger finger fatigue. :) Regardless, having seen this, I shall refrain from slandering the poor Chauchat in conversations about WWI in the future.
    1
  1584. I love the aesthetics of this one. I think I mentioned it when it appeared in the "early handguns and ammo" video, but it looks to my eye like what a Ruger pistol would look like on the cover of a 1950s sci-fi novel. Sort of Bill Ruger meets Ralph McQuarrie.
    1
  1585. '80s Subarus made that same noise when the doors were open, too. Makes me nostalgic every time I hear one.
    1
  1586. +Steven Huxley Well... anything, really. It's kind of a recurring theme.
    1
  1587. Ah, the Luger. I had one of those Mitchell Arms P-08 repros in stainless steel for a while back in the late '90s. It was beautiful! Gorgeous to look at, extremely well-made, with exquisite machining and an air of solid, precise quality about it. And in all the time I had it, it never, ever worked. :) Seriously, I don't think I ever got it to fire more than two rounds in a row without malfunctioning in one way or another, even after going back to the (very courteous and apologetic) manufacturer for an overhaul. This is, I'm guessing, why you don't see those around much any more. Certainly it's why I no longer have one. In hindsight, I should probably have demilled it and hung it on the wall as an art object, because it really was beautifully made. Anyway, Luger memories. One of these days I'll get myself a proper one...
    1
  1588. Aargh, the French Army and their dogged insistence on magazine safeties, compromising perfectly good pistol triggers since at least the 1920s. (We have them to thank for the fact that the Hi-Power has one, even though they then declined to adopt it. Merci, fellas!)
    1
  1589. They wanted it to chamber .30 Carbine and be effective at 300 yards? Is that combination even possible? :)
    1
  1590. 8:27 is always good for a smile. See also: Othais's recent adventure with a Mannlicher 1905. https://youtu.be/x4m8u_Ve-O0?t=22m20s "Perfect! Works every time."
    1
  1591.  @markmcelroy1872  I dunno, I mean, Jarts were more recent than these things.
    1
  1592. +Manic Myna This from someone who evidently believes "think" is a noun.
    1
  1593. The software has almost but not quite the same voice as the ship in Elite Dangerous. "Landing gear. Deployed."
    1
  1594. Home Ec was required for all 7th-grade students at the middle school I went to (ca. 1985), but that across-the-board requirement was a relatively new thing and the teacher plainly did not like having boys in the class. (The following year, everyone had to take Industrial Arts, a.k.a. Wood Shop, and that teacher was just as plainly not enthused about all the girls being there.) I'd say times were different then, but the depressing thing is that in a lot of places they probably weren't.
    1
  1595. I used to have a .22 LR pistol version of an HK416. It was the silliest gun I've ever owned; I bought it from a catalog without a scale reference in the photo and thought it was scaled down to pistol size, which would make it sort of like a raygun-age Mauser broomie, then discovered to my amazement when it arrived that it was in fact enormous. I ended up trading it for a Rossi Circuit Judge, which is also very silly, but much less embarrassing. :)
    1
  1596. At last, Ian covers a gun I already had. :)
    1
  1597. 12 people were expecting something different out of their search results for "hide your crimes". ;)
    1
  1598. Just a note, since I recall you mentioned elsewhere you're not very familiar with them: The taper isn't as visually extreme, but the Browning Hi-Power/FN GP-35's magazine is also a 13-round double-stack-to-single-feed design.
    1
  1599. +Ken Ellson Looks like a Maxim gun, not sure which sub-type.
    1
  1600. +Uryendel One of which is the country the video was made in. So, you know. Deal. :)
    1
  1601. The sound reminds me of that bit in the original Half-Life (and Freeman's Mind) when you're in the abandoned tram tunnels and you hear the mysterious wailing off in the distance. "I'm not an expert in the field? But that sounds to me like the cries of the damned."
    1
  1602. Peter Fabian Must be concernwide, that same double dial is in my '13 Beetle Fender Edition. In that model, it controls the color of the interior accent lighting (red, white, blue, off), which is a nice re-use of an otherwise redundant switch, since the Fender Edition has HID headlamps and so doesn't need a leveling control.
    1
  1603. Digging that giant square pistol grip. Like the Tokarev TT33's grip, evidently optimized for the hands of giant LEGO minifigures. (What is it with the South Africans and terrible shotguns with appalling ergo?)
    1
  1604. Will someone please buy Adam some side shields? It's makin' my hands itch watching him work the lathe without them. Armchair shop safety snark aside, always a treat to watch him work.
    1
  1605. Speaking of Hollywood uses, '92s played '73s in a lot of classic Westerns set before 1892, because they were sturdier and also cheaper for prop departments to acquire (since still in production when those Westerns were being made).
    1
  1606. I came back to re-watch because I got another one today, at least. Now I'm jealous of how easily that takedown bolt turns. Mine feels like it was torque on by a NASCAR pit crew.
    1
  1607. With those shades and the Evil Spock beard, it's like being given a gun lesson by Neo from the Mirror Universe. Which is pretty boss.
    1
  1608. I find I have the "first-order retrievability" problem in my kitchen, not with tools but groceries. If an item isn't in plain sight in the kitchen, or immediately visible upon opening the fridge/freezer, I forget I have it. I've got canned goods in the cabinets from 2002 that I flat forgot about. Luckily, my new fridge has transparent drawers inside it, so that's not the problem it once was. (Yes, I recognize that this problem arises almost entirely from the fact that I am a huge gonk. It is what it is. :)
    1
  1609. Luke DS I've occasionally seen Istanbul (or "Stamboul") mentioned as a district or borough OF Constantinople in books dating to before the whole city was renamed.
    1
  1610. Rather than spot typos, I'll just note that it's German (well, the brand is Swiss, but the language it's in is German), so it's probably pronounced something closer to "tog hoyer".
    1
  1611. That pistol grip looks really not comfortable.
    1
  1612. Well, I'll be sure not to do that, then.
    1
  1613. "They're the sweatpant of shoes."
    1
  1614. I've got one of those Croatian 9mm pistols that's this color. It's... not a great gun, if I'm honest? But I do like the finish a lot.
    1
  1615. The 1996 Mission: Impossible movie crossed an unforgivable line with that shitty final twist in its alleged plot. It has no sequels in my version of the world.
    1
  1616. Oh hey, I used to have one of those ammunition pouch rigs. I think it's for M1 Garand clips. (Also could be part of a "year one" Batman costume! :)
    1
  1617.  @obi-wankenobi7160  Seriously. It's in one of Doug's books, I can't remember which one.
    1
  1618. I know it doesn't mean the same thing, but I can't help but be oddly tickled that the Austro-Hungarian battle plan was "Plan B". (And that they then skipped immediately to Plan R. It's strangely apropos, given how utterly out of ideas Conrad von H obviously was.)
    1
  1619. jjohnston94 That is now my official... what do the kids call it?... headcanon.
    1
  1620. Dang it, Ian, I already wanted one of those stupidly expensive novelty shotguns, and then you had to go and do this. :)
    1
  1621. "Several sources report incorrectly that Heinrich Ortgies died in 1919 and his business was sold after his death, however Der Waffenschmied for 14 April 1937 reported his death as taking place in March of 1937 at the age of 67." https://unblinkingeye.com/Guns/Ortgies/ortgies.html
    1
  1622. "The French had a couple of tools." Sounds like more than a couple, in their arms procurement bureaucracy...
    1
  1623. +Kuddlesworth NA If you're up for it, read Peter Padfield's Battleship sometime, and then try that assertion about navies again. They're just as bad about stuff that's more in their field; it's just that, as Ian notes, small arms aren't really that. :)
    1
  1624. +EisenKreig I know, right? And one with a detachable magazine, to boot. I can almost see the idea behind a magazine cutoff for something that's a hassle to unload and reload, but with a box magazine, if you don't want to use it, surely you could just take it out . But no, this is the British Army, the same organization that issued a rifle with a detachable magazine at a time when that was a revolutionary innovation, then forbade the men to use it properly. They just didn't get magazines, is what I'm saying. (I know, if you took it out you might theoretically lose it, and if British generals of the early 20th century were confident of anything, it was the utter stupidity of the men who served under them. So there's that.)
    1
  1625. Hmm. Was Keith left-handed? It seems odd that the single ornate side of the grip would be the one in the palm of the shooter's hand...
    1
  1626. Angus Khan Oh yeah, I suppose it would at that. Hadn't thought of that, good catch.
    1
  1627. Brand name: American Giant Largest size of hoodie available: 2XL Irony.
    1
  1628. Is somebody working on a car in the background? :)
    1
  1629. 1:17 Nice save, Ian. :)
    1
  1630. I kind of like the instability of the transparent shell version. It adds character. Go home, BB8, you're drunk!
    1
  1631. Given the workings of the Spanish firearms industry at the time, I'm surprised the Spanish army didn't just buy one at a sporting goods store and then mysteriously end up with 150,000 very slightly different ones Bergmann didn't get paid for.
    1
  1632. Money quote: "[Haig] was, as was his habit, very wrong."
    1
  1633. I used to have a Jeep where the driver's seat was like that. In that case it was because the track broke and the guy who welded it back together for me was drunk, but that last part might have been in play at Lamborghini too.
    1
  1634. Camping, forsooth. Ten thousand years of human civilization didn't happen so I would still have to sleep outside.
    1
  1635. That random pile of lumber must be all that's left of the picnic table you destroyed with the CMG-3. :)
    1
  1636. Speaking of interesting, charismatic, but not particularly rare or expensive guns, I recently acquired an Ortgies, which (for those of you who may not know) is a smallish pocket auto made in Germany starting just after WWI. It's in 7.65mm (also known as .32 ACP) and has the oddest safety I can recall encountering on an auto pistol. Otherwise unremarkable (except that it's oddly heavy for its size), but well-made and comfortable if you don't mind using a genteel pinky-out teacup grip. Well worth the $300 worth of other stuff I traded for it, just for its "huh, I never saw one of those before" value. Also, I am required by Federal law to add, "An Ortgies was mentioned in a short story by J.D. Salinger, you know." :) (Which reminds me - Ian, I sent you a YouTube PM a bit ago offering the loan of the Ortgies sometime if you have any interest in doing an FW item about it, but I have one of those weird pre-Google YouTube accounts and I'm not sure PMing from/to those even works, so I may as well mention it here too.)
    1
  1637. Wow. An Australian without a sense of humor, is that even allowed?
    1
  1638. "No surprise: It stopped working." Ian's delivery is often worth the price of admission all by itself. The research is just icing. :)
    1
  1639. Both in its weird design and in the reluctance of its manufacturer to actually be making it, this gun reminds me of the GM P-75 Eagle fighter from World War II. The Eagle was made by the Fisher Body Division, a company which did not technically know anything about making airplanes, basically because the company had to be making something for the war effort and GM's bosses didn't want to be saddled with a bunch of worthless tooling for B-29s when it was all over. Admittedly, the parallel fails a bit if you subscribe to the belief that Fisher also sandbagged the P-75 project on purpose, so as not to have to actually make too many of them either; I'm inclined to agree with Othais's assessment that he was sincerely trying to come up with something useful using the tooling and expertise his workers already had.
    1
  1640. The piano riff that plays around 3:55 reminds me of one of the BGM tracks from The Elder Scrolls IV every single time it comes around. Suddenly I feel like I'm trudging around Cyrodiil in the rain. The response is almost Pavlovian. :)
    1
  1641. The Great War Could be! I think TES4 had original music, but it's possible BethSoft made the OST available for other uses later.
    1
  1642. +morallyambiguousnet "My friends are quite tired of me pointing out which Hollywood movies are rip offs of Kurosawa." In fairness to your friends, that particular habit doesn't take very long to get tired of. :)
    1
  1643. Huh. My father is right-handed but left-eyed (practically blind in his right eye, in fact). I guess we finally know why he's such a rotten shot.
    1
  1644. Rubies look super-awkward to me. Something about that grip geometry just looks... wrong. I've never actually handled one, though, so I don't know if that's actually the case; maybe they're ugly ducklings.
    1
  1645. Passing thought on the "odd territories" question: At that time, Newfoundland wasn't part of Canada, having declined to take part in Confederation in 1869 (it didn't join until 1949), but that didn't stop the 1st Newfoundland Regiment from sending around a thousand men to fight in the war. British Major-General Sir Henry de Beauvoir de Lisle proceeded (spoiler alert - this happens next year) to get most of them killed at the Somme. The Regiment (somehow) recovered, however, and so distinguished itself the following year that it became - and remains! - the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. That's a somewhat more substantial offering than the theoretical "a couple of guys" in the question, admittedly; quite an impressive showing for a dominion with a total population comfortably under a quarter-million, in fact. As a potentially interesting aside, before the Somme they were the only North Americans to fight at Gallipoli, and somehow managed not to take terribly heavy casualties there. Edited to add: Also, in re aerial navigation, remember that IFR stands for I Follow Roads and VFR stands for Visually Follow Roads. :)
    1
  1646. Am I right in thinking that revolver on the shelf behind you is one of the .455-caliber Webleys? Covet.
    1
  1647. +muh1h1 I love how unconvinced Norm looks when he says that. :)
    1
  1648. A lot of people here are comparing it to the PPS-43, and it does look a lot like one, but I'd have to pick it up to be sure. To be really PPS-like, besides being way too long-bodied and awkward to hold, it must also weigh about 400 pounds.
    1
  1649. And sidefire, and upfire, and downfire...
    1
  1650. "Why would they want to do that?" What, you've never been bored? Never had a long night? Never had a lot of cabinets to put up?
    1
  1651. The remarks about Switzerland's good reputation instantly kicked off a mental replay of the old Kids in the Hall sketch. "It's time, it's time - oh! It's time to hate the Swiss." I'd link to it, but YouTube doesn't want to let me paste things today. Just search "sick of the Swiss" and you'll find it. :)
    1
  1652. Enver Pasha's rocking what I like to think of as the full Hercule Poirot.
    1
  1653. So, yeah! That's why sloped armor is where it's at. "That one bounced!"
    1
  1654. This reminds me of that goofy Wildey Moore cannon that turns up in whichever Death Wish movie it's in. 3, I think.
    1
  1655. Heck, I've wanted a Mateba M6 Unica ever since one was a minor plot point in the original Ghost in the Shell theatrical film, ca. 1995. (And I got a Browning Hi-Power for Christmas one year mainly because Axel Foley had one in Beverly Hills Cop .) Hmm, come to think of it, has Ian ever done anything on the Unica? Nothing turns up in a quick glance down the Revolvers playlist...
    1
  1656. 6:08 Er... Royal Flying Corps. Not Flying Corpse. I mean, it says right there he lived until 1956. (Thank you, I'm here all week. Try the fish.)
    1
  1657. "Let me set the stage: It's 1967." Instantly, my brain automatically tags on the guy from the KLF screaming What the f--k's going on?! Also: not only were you not required to wear the seat belts in your '67 Chevy, the seat belts in your '67 Chevy were so halfheartedly designed that they wouldn't be a whole lot of help to you anyway. Also also: You are so right about the catastrophic cost of a C&R license. I subsist largely on gruel and sawdust now--but now I have a Steyr-Hahn! And a Nambu! And one of those little Polish things in 9mm Makarov that's probably got such vicious handling I'd be better off shutting my hand in a door! (You should do a video on that one. I'd lend you mine. :)
    1
  1658. Heheh. Colt's patent was "revolutionary". 'Cause... y'know... revolver? Sorry, I'll be in the car.
    1
  1659. Huh. I just noticed that seems to be a left-handed holster. Being a lefty myself, it took me a moment to realize it was unusual. I always assumed that the way they handled left-handed personnel in the early-20th-century US Army was to beat them right-handed in Basic.
    1
  1660. I just want to note that I was obscurely delighted when Ian said the concept might have "commercial legs" just as the camera took a slow, loving pass around the bipod. :) (Also: "Sgt. Benton--chap with the wings, five rounds rapid.")
    1
  1661. +Brian Burrous Tank crewmen probably disagree with the second part of your thesis. I'm just speculating. :)
    1
  1662. shelbymustang1994jd No, it's part of an old inside joke.
    1
  1663. Norm's "Fuck cancer!" sounded uncannily like how I would expect Baymax to say it.
    1
  1664. +Exploatores Well, at the risk of seeming facetious, you could get an M1 clip (they're not exactly rare) and hit it against something.
    1
  1665. IJLS "rotary barrel cluster gun," because however old I get, inside I will always be 14.
    1
  1666. Haven't watched this in a year or so. I had forgotten how relentless Will is with the beaver jokes.
    1
  1667.  @carolrobinson7779  Well... yes. You are correct. I have not done that. If for no other reason than I'm not that rich. :)
    1
  1668. Upon re-watching, it occurred to me that Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax and Hugo Borchardt should have teamed up. They could have developed the most amazing handgun in the history of humanity and then ignored everyone who tried to convince them to make it in any way practical. It would probably have been able to fire sharks at people, or summon lightning from a clear sky, or something, but with a really uncomfortable grip and 40,000 moving parts.
    1
  1669. +Alcatraz252 It's one of those companies that have divisions that make pretty much everything. Cars, guns, ships, electronics, you name it. I used to work for a PC manufacturer that was a subsidiary of their telecom division.
    1
  1670. Follow-up to the above: it's just arrived, and I note for the record that with six rounds in the magazine, that tab on the follower doesn't stick out of the floor plate. It still needs that slot for clearance, but when fully loaded the tab is flush with the plate, not protruding. Speaking of things that do stick out, the gun does indeed take full-size 1911 magazines, which is hilarious. :)
    1
  1671. See response above. Short version: C/96 Mausers don't have slides.
    1
  1672. Money quote in this one: "According to the nephew of a German officer, von Lettow-Vorbeck didn't put it that politely."
    1
  1673. I think I mentioned this in the comments for the episode on Erich Maria Remarque, but it bears repeating here: Another excellent book on the poilu's life is Henri Barbusse's "Under Fire" (originally published in French as "La Feu"). Like "All Quiet", it's a novel heavily infused with memoir by a front-line soldier; unlike both "All Quiet" and Barthas's diaries, it was published while the war was still going on, in 1916, as an attempt to show the people behind the lines what was really going on up there - and it's worth noting that Barbusse, like Barthas, was not impressed by what was really going on up there. One of the reviews on the book's Amazon product page describes Barbusse's take on the war as "more a cry of rage than a consistent argument," which I would accept as a fair analysis. The book is brilliant, but crushing, and it must have rustled more than a few jimmies in the rear area.
    1
  1674. Does get a bit hot in unexpected places, though.
    1
  1675. Luke DS Keep in mind, though, that you already knew what they're for.  If you didn't - never mind the "trained gunsmith" part, if you didn't know a dang THING about guns - would it really be that obvious?  I tend to doubt it, but don't go by me. :)
    1
  1676. It's even worse than the washer system in old VW Beetles, which was, I kid you not, powered by the pressure in the spare tire. Until there wasn't any left, at which point the washer didn't work and your spare was flat.
    1
  1677. I've got an old "Bolo" Mauser that has the "every imaginable part is numbered" thing going on, and no two numbers anywhere I've been able to find them match. It looks fine! But it doesn't work. :) (In fact, I sent it away to see if I could get it working, and when it came back it still didn't work but in a different way, because it had been taken apart and put back together out of the same Frankenstein pile of parts. The gunsmith was like, "Yeah, hang this one on the wall, it's done.")
    1
  1678. So basically, Ian took his inner child to Build-a-Gat Workshop.
    1
  1679. All that, and a bed that is not for your exclusive use too!
    1
  1680. After this preview, I now anticipate being notified that mine has shipped even more. I need to know what's going on on that page where the pullquote is "they've never handled a rifle before." :)
    1
  1681. "Resin fiberglass plasticky things. There's a great future in resin fiberglass plasticky things."
    1
  1682. O, were it mine with tuneful Maro’s art To wake to sympathy the feeling heart; Like him the smooth and mournful verse to dress In all the pomp of exquisite distress, Then too severely taught by cruel fate, To share in all the perils I relate, Then might I with unrivalled strains deplore The impervious horrors of a leeward shore! —William Falconer (1732–1770?), The Shipwreck (1762)
    1
  1683. I feel like this gun was made for tracer ammunition.
    1
  1684. In terms of the aesthetics question, it's like they used to say in aircraft design: if it looks right, it probably flies right.* * guns are probably not actually like that at all
    1
  1685. Old surplus ammo: providing the authentic flintlock experience without all that annoying fiddling around with frizzens. (Is this the same vz52 that once got flung into a Dumpster at a match? :)
    1
  1686. Instead, it'll leak whatever toxic stuff the batteries are made of...
    1
  1687. And steam-powered cars.
    1
  1688. Slightly hypnotized by that wacky ejection port cover flapping. It gets a bit out of sync with the actual ejections as the burst goes on, probably because of the mechanism trying to actuate it on the instroke as well; there isn't quite enough time for it to open and close fully before it's being opened again.
    1
  1689. To be fair, they didn't work in the '50s, but they were advertised. :)
    1
  1690. I am amazed that no one replied, "Because he's the type of guy to do that."
    1
  1691.  @theskillzreport  I don't think I did that, but upon reflection, it doesn't surprise me much. I used to commute to work from Oakland to Pleasanton on I-580, and I remember one day a guy flipped a sewage tanker on that big flyover in Castro Valley. That must have been fun for the people who lived in the neighborhood under the highway.
    1
  1692. I remember leafing through a Shooter's Bible in the '80s and finding among Llama's offerings a gold-damascened edition of their 1911 clone, which was sort of like if Sachsenring had offered a super-deluxe version of the Trabant with leather seats and air conditioning.
    1
  1693. It's cheaper than a Model X, but I wonder if it's any less jaw-droppingly expensive to repair than one. I know someone whose Model X got bent in a traffic accident. The damage didn't even involve any of the actual core techy bits, and the repairs still cost someone (presumably the other driver's insurance company) more than the tax value of my house. Now, granted, it's not a very big house, but still.
    1
  1694. Sort of the car equivalent of housing market improvements making your house more valuable, but jacking up your property taxes. No! Go away, urban yuppies! Stop making my tiny woods town a Destination!
    1
  1695. I wonder if they all say "1 di 900", or if that specific one is literally the first of the batch. The latter seems kind of unlikely, but the former is a bit weird. I mean, we can see that it's only one of them. :)
    1
  1696. So, wait... the use case for these things literally is James Bond frogman fights? How often in history have those actually happened? Evidently more than I would've thought, if there's standard-issue equipment for it.
    1
  1697. I was so ready to love the R51. I might get one anyway, just because they're cheap and they have that what-if value, but what a disappointment. Maybe if they hadn't tried to push it into 9mm Para, things would have worked out differently, although based on what I hear about their QA, maybe not.
    1
  1698. The little whimper after he's admonished. "We're not going to bark." "Aww, but..."
    1
  1699. I know what you meant, but I'm really enjoying the image of a can with a self-opening lid. How would it know when was the right time to open? Would it be voice-controlled? Or connected to a smartwatch app that monitors the wearer's vital signs for evidence of acute bean cravings? :)
    1
  1700. Uh, Mike, I think the OP was talking about the engine compartment vents, which is the bit that was actually visible at 0:19. Not the cabin vents, which, thanks to you, I can now never un-see. (Although, boy howdy, that would be one geometrically regular lady garden. Like something out of a Hajime Sorayama roboporn painting. :)
    1
  1701. There's kind of a ribbed vent-lookin' black thing in between the cylinder banks (I think? not sure what anything really is on Space Engine here :). I don't know what said black thing is for, offhand, but I think that's what the OP was referring to.
    1
  1702. I think he'll be hard pressed to top https://youtu.be/olLjXYKfUYA , ever.
    1
  1703. "Despite being so unhappy, the car just never seemed to stop." That seems appropriate somehow for a car made in England.
    1
  1704. My uncle once bought a pickup that came with a free gun under the seat. Unfortunately, the first he heard about it was from the cop who found it. I'm told that made for a long afternoon.
    1
  1705. Gosh. They're quite long-lived for such a big breed.
    1
  1706. I'm just curious--where do you even get one-gallon bottles of Grey Poupon? Is that a warehouse-club thing?
    1
  1707. The fact that people still insist on living near volcanoes anywhere kind of boggles my mind. Any other animal knows better than to stick its face in a fire more than once. Humans? Not so much!
    1
  1708. The car shown at 1:52 isn't a New Beetle, those went out of production in 2011. It's one of the third-generation A5 Beetles introduced in 2012 (and sadly ceasing production next month without a replacement in the pipeline). Just, you know. For the record.
    1
  1709. (considers condition of engine bay and that bin the cup holders go in) "I rented this Tahoe Hybrid on Turo, from someone who clearly didn't imagine it would be used to shoot a video for three million people on the Internet." Also: Heck, Doug, in the days before steering wheel controls, that same turn signal stalk also had all the controls for the cruise control on it.
    1
  1710. When I was a kid, a friend of my mother's had a Doberman like that. Talked a big game and was the biggest coward on the block. He was afraid of our golden retriever, which, I mean, what? Who's afraid of a golden retriever? What's he going to do, shed on you?
    1
  1711. As a sort of control group, I, like my father before me and his father before him, have traditionally opted to do neither of those things and just... let it ride. Maybe because the summers are so short in these parts (like the old joke goes, Maine gets nine months of winter and three months of poor sledding), we've never had a problem with the leftover fuel going off during the off-season. This is not a confident assertion that fuel stabilizer doesn't do anything; it is merely a data point. :) (Then again, my snow thrower is much more elaborate than that one, with two... possibly three?... augers and a tracked drive system, so it has an electric starter. A person would have to be nuts, or at least way beefier than I am, to try to cold start that old beast with the pull cord. So maybe that's better at getting the engine going with stale gas? I dunno.)
    1
  1712. "When the police first called the plant, they were assured that nothing was amiss." Who answered the phone, Han Solo? "Uh, had a slight malfunction, but uh, everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine, we're all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?"
    1
  1713. "Somebody's gotta tell me when a lack of maintenance becomes 'patina'." —Mark Novak (Also, I'm probably going to dream about being in that car that ended up upside down tonight. It'll pair nicely with my recurring dream of finding myself in the back seat of a speeding car that no one's driving.)
    1
  1714. - The fact that you can set the navigation system to take you to Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands reminds me of the old Dead Milkmen song "Bitchin' Camaro". "Yeah, my folks drove it up from the Bahamas." "You're kidding!" "I must be, the Bahamas are islands." - Whether "City of Vaughan Joint Operations" is an attraction depends on whether marijuana is legal in Ontario, I should think. - I'm feeling a mild allergy attack coming on just from looking at all that pollen wafting around. - The most hilarious Aston Martin for Doug to review would be a Cygnet. Let's make that happen, Aston dealers.
    1
  1715. Shit, I'd have flinched all the way back to my car, that thing's terrifying.
    1
  1716. FIG. A Thomas Magnum's ne'er-do-well younger brother Ian demonstrates the MAS 38 he stole when he deserted from the French Foreign Legion.
    1
  1717. Funnily enough, one of my grandfathers (the one who was a competitive marksman for the U.S. Army Reserve in the '50s) had a pretty low opinion of the M1911. He thought they were uncomfortable to shoot and took too much frigging around with to make decently accurate. If he were still alive and I asked him what the greatest pistol ever created was, he'd probably say the Ruger Standard. :) (Come to think aboutr it, I don't know what the other grandfather thought.)
    1
  1718. The "War Office" guesses are intuitive, but I think it's likely this was originally made for the little-known postwar counterespionage agency W.O.O.C.(P).
    1
  1719. Now, Ian. You know full well that if 8.32mm Hellriegel had existed, the French would have chambered an SMG for it 40 years later for no evident reason. :)
    1
  1720.  @SinanDira  Mine had to have a new alternator put in it in an auto parts store parking lot on Christmas Day one year, which did not dispose my father kindly toward it, I must admit...
    1
  1721. Oh cool, I just re-watched the Mandalorian Bergmann episode a day or two ago and though, "Huh, I wonder what happened with that 'guns of Star Wars' thing he mentioned wanting to do." And here it is! Super cool. I've always (well, since I was old enough to consider these things, anwyay--the movie did come out when I was four, after all) suspected that there were so many WWII guns in the first film because it was shot in England, where movies about WWII were a major export for decades. It's nice to have that old pet theory confirmed. People forget nowadays that, unlike the more modern ones, the original Star Wars wasn't made on the kind of budget that could build a decent-size ocean liner. I love that the stormtrooper blasters have shoulder stocks when they're wearing armor that would make using a shoulder stock impossible. I suppose that's why they never, ever unfold them. Probably some enormous kickback to the stock subcontractor, we all know how stupendously corrupt the Imperial military-industrial complex was. :) APPENDICES: A: Being That Guy dep't: The Ruger Mk II wasn't out until 1982, so Greedo's blaster must be based on a Standard (retroactively Mk I). B: Protip for would-be DL-44 replica makers: Start with a Denix C96 model. There are conversion kits out there that are specifically designed with modding a Denix in mind. Adam Savage has a video on the Tested channel about building one (in which he determined that the prop they used was originally made for an earlier movie, one starring Frank Sinatra as an assassin, if memory serves).
    1
  1722. I think my favorite Weird Moment in a Forgotten Weapons video is the one at the beginning of the Medusa Model 47 vid, where Ian says "Well, the apocalypse has happened," and Karl runs past in the background, screaming and firing randomly into the ground.
    1
  1723. I can forgive stretching it to three words if the company's name is two, or possibly even four in order to include a trim level, but no car should be allowed to have a name longer than five words. Six is right out. (EXCEPTION: The Japanese can keep using as many words as they want, so that the rest of the world can still marvel at things like Honda's Vamos Hobio Travel Dog and Wonderful Open-Hearted Wagon.)
    1
  1724. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre et al.
    1
  1725. Good old Worcester, the former odd-brand-guns and barbed wire capital of the world.
    1
  1726. I see Massachusetts is still doing that "mark the license 'under 21', license expires long after holder's 21st birthday" thing.
    1
  1727. Handie-talkies did exist in 1971, although they were enormous, very heavy, and had pitifully short range and battery life by modern standards.
    1
  1728. Good old Colt, always going for the really wide markets.
    1
  1729. This brings back a surprising memory: When I was a kid, a friend of mine had a toy Thompson that was about that size. It was the best-made toy gun I've ever seen in my life--almost more of a model than a toy, in terms of how detailed it was, but as rugged as a toy ought to be. It even had the detachable shoulder stock.
    1
  1730. In this context, the ad jingle at the end lands kind of like Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa's welcome speech from the old Mortal Kombat movie. "Treasure these moments... as though they were your last."
    1
  1731. I don't know precisely what's happening on the back end of it, but Amazon's pricing system for what they used to call "marketplace" sellers can occasionally go into these insane escalating death spirals. You'll sometimes see hard-to-source or out-of-print books or DVD sets priced at utterly ridiculous levels, thousands of dollars, and often three or four of them within a few cents of each other at the same absurd levels. It's got to be some kind of automatiion failure, there can't be that many deranged human vendors thinking that the second volume of Armored Fleet Dairugger XV or whatever is really worth upwards of $4,000.
    1
  1732. And he's ridin' around on that glider thing And he's throwin' that weird pumpkin bomb Yes he's wearin' that dumb Power Rangers mask But he's scarier without it on
    1
  1733. By the 1960s, the correct term was "anticommunist".
    1
  1734. The photo of the Prefect of Police is (unintentionally?) hilarious. He looks like he's thinking, Well, daggonnit, I TOLD him this would happen.
    1
  1735. My favorite OG Star Trek prop is the laser pistol from "The Cage", because it's clearly made from parts of a junked manual typewriter, and I just love that kind of thing. That shoestring-budget ingenuity.
    1
  1736. I lost it completely at "It's just trees and curves and mailboxes and trailers and trash cans and possums"
    1
  1737. Besides which, it doesn't even say that, it says he saved the car. Which is probably a slight exaggeration, but even so. :)
    1
  1738. And unlike with its percussion predecessor, a left-handed shooter doesn't get cap shrapnel and powder scorching all down the inside of the right forearm! That's a win...
    1
  1739. Every time I see that pan across the CNC showroom, I see that LFA--well, you could hardly miss it, could you?--and I think, Yep. Somebody actually bought it in that color on purpose.
    1
  1740. They do, however, offer a wider range of seating positions, which is important for those of us who aren't shaped like an 80th-percentile crash test dummy.
    1
  1741.  @TechnologyConnections  The house is 101 years old, although the current heating system dates to the '90s sometime. I do appreciate the elegance of the design, although in practice it annoys me slightly in the winter. The first winter I lived here, it took me a while to figure out that I should shower in the morning and THEN turn the thermostat up for the day--the boiler can't bring the house up to daytime temp and provide decently hot water on the domestic loop at the same time, and the storage tank is too small to cover the difference.
    1
  1742. Oh! Is that why it's called the Auto-5? Now I feel dumb.
    1
  1743.  @TechnologyConnections  Huh, OK. I never used one, so all this time I had it filed in my head as an attempt at a next-gen 35mm system. Now I'm even less surprised it didn't work.
    1
  1744. The antique/C&R firearms community needs a more concise and catchy name for the button on early fixed-mag semiautos and guns like this that makes the ammo fly out. I suggest we call it the McCarthy Switch.
    1
  1745. Or the machine gun OED.
    1
  1746. By this point, they all have the engines from 1980s-vintage Soviet tractors in them, but...
    1
  1747. This is probably the best comment this video will ever get.
    1
  1748.  @pex_the_unalivedrunk6785  I'm torn between that or the ECTO-1 siren from Ghostbusters.
    1
  1749. I dispute the assertion that that is called "the fun switch" on any rifle firing a full-power 1890s cartridge. "The call-my-orthopedist switch" seems more appropriate. :) Also, watching the whole rifle flex thanks to the action of the compensator in the high-speed is simultaneously hypnotic and disturbing.
    1
  1750. "There's Poupon my _____!" just... never gets old, somehow. :)
    1
  1751. Clearly, the other hand is needed to hold the whip.
    1
  1752. You wouldn't think "make sure the fire department has at least one ladder long enough to reach the highest floor in town" would be a high bar for a city government to clear, but, again and again, it's a factor.
    1
  1753. That grip angle makes perfect sense if your hands are attached backwards.
    1
  1754. Rifles with a normal, wristed stock that someone obviously stuck a pistol grip on afterward always look so weird to me.
    1
  1755. "During the 1930s, the National Research Council set out to try and find a non-addictive morphine derivative." Meanwhile, in Germany, the inventors of heroin sigh and mutter, "Jetzt geht das schon wieder los..."
    1
  1756. As James May once put it, "Don't want to be on time or anywhere near where you need to go? The train station is on the left."
    1
  1757. I wonder whether Takata & Co. had any connection to the later Takata Corporation (makers of shoddy automotive safety equipment since at least the 1980s). Wikipedia says the latter company was founded in 1933, but doesn't say anything for or against the idea of precursor companies by that name.
    1
  1758. I know it's added in post-production, but even so, part of me was disappointed that the pack didn't make the noise when they switched it on. You know the one I mean. :)
    1
  1759. I wonder if they have the other nacelle tails, the ones without the spheres. I assume that's how the original production did that visual, by swapping out the tips...
    1
  1760. This reminds me of the Big Bayou Canot disaster of 1993, except that was a railroad bridge. All the ingredients of a PD incident are there: a barge, a bridge, a passenger train, and no finding of criminal liability...
    1
  1761. Was that the baker who credited his survival to the fact that he got stupendously drunk as soon as he heard that the ship was going to sink?
    1
  1762. Making Eibar-style gold damascening seem restrained and tasteful since whenever.
    1
  1763. ... Mercifully.
    1
  1764. To be fair to Maserati, all crossovers look like clown shoes.
    1
  1765. The mills where most of the paper for those telephone directories--at least those published by NYNEX and Bell Atlantic--was made used to be in my hometown and the next town over. The same mills also made a vast amount of the newsprint paper used in the eastern United States, once upon a prior century. They're gone now, of course.
    1
  1766. Were they even allowed to be left-handed in the Army in the 1940s? I genuinely wonder about that. The Army of that era was not known for giving a crap what enlisted personnel thought about any other facet of their operational lives, after all.
    1
  1767.  @TACNERD1  I refer you back to the part reading, "(supposed to be)". Both of those organizations were configured to "run as a business" by politicians hostile to the principles of public service, specifically to set them up for failure.
    1
  1768.  @TACNERD1  Well, you're entitled to your opinion, even if, as in this case, it is wrong. :)
    1
  1769. When Ed said "we were starting to get a lot of demand for exotic cars from South America," my immediate thought was "Wait, are there any exotic cars from South America?" #OrIsThatNotWhatYouMeant
    1
  1770. Wow, they really do sound like that. I always assumed that "ploonk" noise was a movie thing. What a deeply satisfying sound.
    1
  1771. That "magazine won't go in unless the bolt is open" is tolerable in a gun that has a bolt hold-open, but in an AK, it's like they deliberately wanted to draw attention to the platform's most glaring missing feature. :)
    1
  1772. I question the historical accuracy of the graphic depicting the birth of Newham Council. ;)
    1
  1773. Meanwhile, the girl you meet on the Internet is probably an SVR agent. Six of one...
    1
  1774. "He just bit me!" "Really?" (big chops lick) "I did, and you were delicious."
    1
  1775. Goodness, what a cross. Was that deliberate? Did someone seriously look at a Great Pyr and think, "You know what, though, this dog could be bigger"? :)
    1
  1776. Ric Flair would be proud.
    1
  1777. Fortunately, you can't see the exterior styling when you're driving it.
    1
  1778. I love my M1 carbine. I don't know as I'd want to stake my life on it, but speaking as a person who doesn't have to do that, it's my favorite shoulder arm.
    1
  1779. My aunt had an earlier one of these for decades. Not a succession of them, the same one. It just wouldn't die. She didn't have kids, she just wanted the biggest vehicle they had, and in 1988, that was the Suburban. Early on, some smartass chipped the "an" off the badge, and she never bothered to get it fixed, so we all called it the Suburb. It was a sad day in the extended family when the Suburb finally expired. I think it had something like 300,000 miles on it when it finally went to the junkyard.
    1
  1780. Why is their building shaped like a Pepsi logo? Weird company.
    1
  1781.  @21Piloteer  Seventeen states and the District of Columbia. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the states that do annual inspections are in the Northeast, where the roads are as salty as most of the drivers.
    1
  1782. The stealth mode is presumably less hilarious to the pedestrians who get mowed down because they don't hear the car coming and the driver is busy playing that power system Tetris game all hybrid cars come with. I'm just putting it out there.
    1
  1783. Heh, FASA (the now-defunct tabletop games publisher) did that in the Shadowrun RPG setting, back in the late '80s. The Browning Max-Power was one of the heavy handgun choices in the original game manual, and then an improved model called the Ultra-Power appeared in one of the equipment supplements. The first edition of the game was set in 2050, which was an unimaginably distant future year in 1989. :)
    1
  1784. Exciting day at the office for the quartermaster, eh?
    1
  1785.  @catfan__  do they indeed
    1
  1786. You heard it here first, gang: Ian says thumbs down on the Alien. ;)
    1
  1787. I initially misread that as "confounding" and it was still perfectly plausible. :)
    1
  1788. @missingsig To be completely fair, no one knew CFCs were anything other than a miracle chemical until long after Midgley's death. They were invented to replace hideously dangerous refrigerants like ammonia, which routinely killed whole households when they leaked from early fridges, and did that job safely and effectively for decades before their effects on stratospheric ozone were discovered (more or less by accident, as it happens).
    1
  1789.  @delfinenteddyson9865  It's possible with the acute form, particularly in adults, if it's not too far advanced when the source of lead is removed. Chronic poisoning, not so much, and the neurological effects may never completely heal in any case. As it happens, later in life Midgley was paralyzed by polio, to which he may have been left particularly susceptible by his earlier lead exposure.
    1
  1790. I know it was a screen stunt and all, but I have serious doubts that that ceramic car coating stuff is food-grade.
    1
  1791. I see what you did there.
    1
  1792. "MFG'D BY" is the funniest gun marking I've seen in a while, given that "MFG" stands for "manufacturing". Really, guys? Your gun was manufacturinged by California Arms, was it?
    1
  1793. Is it just my imagination, or is the floral pattern on the book's cover in the (stylized, somewhat vague) shape of Japan?
    1
  1794. That, and the British armed forces have always been suspicious of the newly fangled.
    1
  1795. Shout-out to the late Dr. John Stapp (1910–1999), whose pioneering studies of human response to acceleration in the 1940s and '50s developed the fundamental science on which much ejection seat, parachute harness, and seat restraint technology is still based today. He carried out most of his experiments on himself, including one rocket sled run in 1954 in which he demonstrated that, properly strapped in and prepared, a man can survive a 46.2-G acceleration without permanent injury (although he did go temporarily blind from... gulp... intraocular bleeding).
    1
  1796. This is what I imagine hearing car stories from Tom Waits would sound like.
    1
  1797. The golden we had when I was a kid loved to try to bite the stream of water coming out of a hose. He never understood why it didn't work. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but we loved him. :)
    1
  1798. "Aston Martin Hostage Negotiators" would be a good name for a band.
    1
  1799. Hmm, how odd. My father also has a dog who looks like an uncommonly large Yorkie (which is what Dad was told he is) with unusually floppy ears. The dog was a rescue, so Dad's never had any reliable infomation about where he came from, and now I find myself wondering if he might be a similar sort of hybrid. As a bit of a kicker, the old man's dog's name is Oliver too.
    1
  1800. Lysaght appears to be a company that makes metal roofing, which I assume means making the guns was one of those wartime emergency factory repurposings, like the American jukebox company that made M1 Carbines. :)
    1
  1801. I always wonder if the Turo people (that is, the car owners, not the people who run the service) know that someone is renting their car in order to do a YouTube video about how bad it is.
    1
  1802. Ah, nostalgia. My parents had a GL wagon of the same vintage as that red-and-white BRAT when I was a kid, and it had the same door-open chime. The sound instantly takes me back to when I was 11 and my mother would stand next to the car with the driver's door open and chat with one of her friends in the supermarket parking lot for what felt like up to about 20 hours, while I sat in the back listening to that chime go endlessly on. That poor car was cursed. I think it lasted all of two years, through no fault of its own. If there was a way for someone to come along and carelessly damage a car, it would find a way to be the car it happened to. Eventually it got totaled when the local golf pro T-boned it at an intersection with his mid-'70s boatamatic Thunderbird. Still, none of us who were in it died! Points for that, Subaru. Also: I bet you that speedometer face is the same one that was fitted for the Japanese domestic market, and all they did was change the gear ratio on the inner workings and paint "MPH" in at the bottom. Admittedly, 120 kph is still pretty optimistic for one of those cars.
    1
  1803. Surely that would just be the usual punt gun, but loaded with tennis balls. :)
    1
  1804. My favorite car classified photo was on an ad in a local newspaper for a mid-1980s Buick the owner wanted $500 for a couple years ago. It was a roadside snapshot of some nice autumn foliage that clearly wasn't about the car at all; it just happens to be parked by the side of the road. Only about a third of the car is even in the shot. It's like when the guy decided to sell the car, that was the only picture in his phone's camera roll that it was even partially in. I don't even think it was a scam--I think for 500 bucks, he just couldn't be bothered to go outside and take another picture. :)
    1
  1805. I gotta say, having lost a lot of things to a basement flood a few years ago, that water heater standing right next to shelves full of valuable printed materials makes me sort of sympathetically uneasy.
    1
  1806. And the shift boot is probably a reasonable approximation of his ballsack.
    1
  1807. "So, funny story--it turns out mounting a hand grenade in the steering wheel of every car wasn't really a great idea after all."
    1
  1808. Memo to self: Stay. Inland.
    1
  1809. I'm thinking of two words, and those two words are "field expedient". :)
    1
  1810. Important addendum to the leash advice: make sure it's a proper leash and not one of those spring-loaded retractable things with the 25-foot line. A greyhound can get up to speed in that distance, and you do not want to be holding onto the winch when they hit the end of the line...
    1
  1811. I had just enough time to wonder what that off-camera crash was before the chicken butt joke. Well played.
    1
  1812.  @al112v4  Hence Weird Al Yankovic's line, "But he's scarier without it on." :)
    1
  1813. If you'd like more information about the Ross, why not write to the Canadian Bureau of Flawed Rifle Heritage in Ottawa
    1
  1814. I had a childhood pal whose family had a Newfoundland. My favorite feature of that dog was his determination to rescue people from the lake alongside their summer cottage who did not, strictly speaking, require rescuing. All you had to do was splash a little and Cap'n would bolt up from his otherwise-perpetual slumber, rush the boat dock, and plunge into the water like "HANG ON! I'LL SAVE YOU!" It was a great trick to pull on new people who hadn't been invited to their camp before. :)
    1
  1815. Maybe they were talking about the Comet's crew, who I have to assume went to Brown Alert when they saw him coming.
    1
  1816. I bought the original full-scale Woody and Buzz toys when the first Toy Story came out, and had them in my office at work. One day a co-worker paused on her way past, leaned in the door, and exclaimed, "Hey! You've got a big Woody!" "I sure do," I replied. "I keep him right next to my big Buzz." My co-worker laughed and went on her way. Shortly thereafter, I--and only I--got called on the carpet in HR, because one of their people had been in the department at the time on other business and overheard the conversatioon. That struck me as a bit unfair, since I wasn't even the one who had uttered the phrase "a big Woody".
    1
  1817. It is a fascinating artifact, but I have deeply mixed feelings about it, given that the people responsible for the exhibit had to loot a mass grave to get it.
    1
  1818. Steroids, or the hot new all-donut diet.
    1
  1819. The most amazing thing to me is, that guy was able to make a joke about it when the techs came to help him out of the machine. That speaks to a level of zen the rest of us can only dream of possessing.
    1
  1820. I don't mind the cowling so much, but the Wrangler never had any business having rectangular headlights.:)
    1
  1821.  @mustafahumar3831  I am not.
    1
  1822. There are lots of those in the history of firearms. :)
    1
  1823. "Just clunky and dumb, but doesn't really cause any problems" reminds me of my last employee review.
    1
  1824. Mauser's later HSc does that magazine reload/drop slide thing too; there is, as far as I can tell, no other way to get it to close, and it has a magazine safety to boot, so if you lose the magazine you are completely beached.
    1
  1825. 14:00 For reference, the .50 Browning Machine Gun cartridge is not supposed to have a belted case.
    1
  1826. And of course they called it the Alpha. Gotta know your target market...
    1
  1827. In re the cost of early prerecorded videocassettes: I'm old enough--just--to remember when they became available to rent. At the one store in my town that offered them (which was a pharmacy, of all things, in its "day job"), they took the act of renting the tapes out more seriously than they did renting out the machines to play them. You could rent a VCP (not R, because not capable of recording) by the week and with no deposit, but the contract for renting the tapes read like a criminal indictment. May the gods themselves help you if you don't bring it back after one night, and if anything happens to it, even they won't be able to intervene. They wouldn't even consider selling you a copy, even used, because then they'd have to get another one to replace it in their own inventory, and it wasn't in the operating budget.
    1
  1828. I had a first-generation Neon Sport (IIRC, the only difference between the "Sport" and the trim level below it was a slightly better radio), which I loved, but the poor thing was cursed. It rarely broke on its own initiative, which was rare for a '90s Chrysler, but things kept happening to it. People ran into it when it was parked--multiple times. It was once stolen, recovered, and then stolen again from the impound lot. Eventually it died in a flood, which was a sufficiently Biblical end for a car as long-suffering as that one. Anyone know what those hoses/cables/whatever labeled "2-3-1" under the hood are?
    1
  1829. Yes, I did just watch a grown man explode mayonnaise all over himself with a Fallout 4 pipe shotgun, then unintentionally waterboard himself with a five-gallon carboy of spring water trying to get the mayo off his shirt. That is a thing that just happened in my life. :)
    1
  1830. Wait, Othais has a last name? (Nice touch that he's dropping the magazine on the Madsen. :)
    1
  1831. Less potent than the Doom Guy's his fist may be, but I still wouldn't want Scott to punch me in the face. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
    1
  1832. duz the Colt/Dickins book hav Sam Colt's own spelings intackt?
    1
  1833.  @NRJenzenJones  Aww. (Admittedly, it's probably just as well. I still remember the headache I got trying to read Iain M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn years ago.)
    1
  1834. This is how you can tell that the people who developed early cartridge ammunition were not trained to modern standards. Anyone who's been to school today knows that if you're going to round three-place numbers down to two places, 0.458" is .46 caliber. :)
    1
  1835. I've just realized the two people on Earth this gun was really designed for, the only two who could employ its... unique... locking mechanism to full effect: Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers.
    1
  1836. The one pictured at 3:05 looks weirdly residential, like some kind of abandoned farmhouse with a bizarrely arranged fence.
    1
  1837. By a weird coincidence, a little less than two years before, a German ICE train suffered a catastrophic derailment in a place called Eschede, thus guaranteeing that since this one happened, people who study this kind of thing will always be slightly uncertain as to which disaster is which.
    1
  1838. "And I - where is that one? Oh! Yeah! Here- uhhh... boop boop beep beep beep?" (looks around in bemusement) Adam has perfectly captured how my brain works in these few seconds, and it made me giggle so hard.
    1
  1839. I'm not sure which is the greater crime against nature, a mid-engined Corvette or a Mustang soccer bus.
    1
  1840. "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate..."
    1
  1841.  @josephfreeman3816  In fairness(?) to the Mk 14, the torpedo that ran in a circle and sank Tang was a Mk 18. (Which, if anything, was even worse than the Mk 14, because it had the same guidance problems and was slower and harder to maintain. One of the sub commanders sent out with the early Mk 18s reported that of 13 he fired, seven missed outright, one sank when fired, one surfaced when fired, and three somehow managed to hit their own torpedo tube's open outer door on the way out, fortunately without going off.)
    1
  1842. The Cullinan in the blind-spot detection setup screen is the only one in the world that will ever signal for a lane change.
    1
  1843. I feel like that flap in the fuel filler should say GOT OIL?
    1
  1844. That's impressive, I wouldn't have thought a shotgun would be able to handle that kind of chamber pressures.
    1
  1845. Man alive, these guys should've done a collab with Rogak.
    1
  1846. "Shwasew", only with all the vowels sort of half-swallowed?
    1
  1847. To be fair, the helmet did fulfil its true military purpose: it kept the head more or less together so Graves Registration could find it easier.
    1
  1848. "For the man who has reason to believe his life is in danger." OK, maybe it's just me, but if I had reason to believe my life was in danger, I wouldn't reach for a tiny handgun, however well-made. I'd be thinking "shotgun", minimum.
    1
  1849. On a point of order, to borrow a phrase from the Navy, I doubt anything can be truly Scott-proof. The best any real-world object can do is to be Scott-resistant. :)
    1
  1850. That's probably because it's a really station wagon with sliding doors. :)
    1
  1851. INT 18, WIS 6
    1
  1852. It's not quite the worst idea for a revolver. I mean, it's not the one with the belt buckle holster, which I think is also made by NAA.
    1
  1853. That Chauchat bipod swinging back and forth in Dramatic Slo-Mo during the intro made me giggle uncontrollably, which might be the first time a Chauchat has ever caused that reaction.
    1
  1854. I won't lie, I went into the winding-up sequence half expecting a Spongebob gag. "Four... five... " (card with VO in bad French accent: TWO HOURS LATER) "... twenty-two... twenty-three."
    1
  1855. Hitler was sort of generally bad at boats. On the military side, his conception of naval strategy never really advanced past 1916, and he preferred to employ admirals who had ideas no newer than his own, all of which may go some way toward explaining why the Kriegsmarine spent most of the war fooling around with wildly outdated concepts like commerce raiding with surface ships while building the wrong types of submarines and not enough of them. As such, it doesn't shock me that his government had no particular depth (pardon the pun) of commitment to commercial shipping either. Some people at NDL and HAPAG, with their more Hanseatic backgrounds, might have had the requisite vision of Germany as a maritime power, but the Austrian corporal and his henchmen just didn't.
    1
  1856. This is making me miss my Century AK all over again. (Although that one was a Zastava, I guess from before they started just selling stuff in the US themselves.)
    1
  1857. It's a petty thing, but I find that whining noise made by the surfaces sliding against each other when the bolt handle is worked really unpleasant.
    1
  1858. Have they actually started building Minis properly? I had one of the early ones, and while it was very fun to drive when it worked, it hardly ever worked.
    1
  1859. I wish that one Danish inventor's entry to the rifle trials had been chosen, simply because it would be so much fun if the history of American forces in World War II were full of references to the M1 Bang.
    1
  1860. "Sock it to ME?!" —Richard M. Nixon, who clearly did not understand what his handlers had put him up to
    1
  1861. It strikes me that what really would have prevented this accident in a Winchester '66 and beyond isn't so much the closed tube as what makes it possible--namely Mr. King's patented loading gate, which removes the necessity to fiddle around with the magazine follower in the first place. If you can't play with the spring, you can't blow yourself up with it! (They should have used that as a marketing slogan.)
    1
  1862. I remember seeing this on the Headstamp website a while back and thinking, The madman! Is this an injoke for the YT crew or is he actually going to do that? Based on the purple cover, the answer appears to be "Both." I am on board. :)
    1
  1863. "got my keys... got my phone... I didn't have a hat today... OK. good to go."
    1
  1864. What I have learned from this video is that Doug has never had a passenger who wants both a soda and a milkshake at the drive-thru.
    1
  1865. The one where the pitch goes up between the two tones indicating that the elevator is going down annoys me out of all proportion to how significant the problem is. Also, I would be horribly tempted to make the chime on any elevator I was responsible for just a voice saying "DING," like some kind of narrated comic book panel.
    1
  1866. ... Herstal?
    1
  1867. The part about the wake inescapably puts me in mind of that one Dropkick Murphys song... You may bury me with an enemy in Mount Calvary You can stack me on a pyre and soak me down with whisky Roast me to a blackened crisp and throw me in a pile I could really give a shit, I'm goin' out in style
    1
  1868. The words "Winchester Mystery" conjures up a vision of a rifle that someone at the company felt compelled to keep designing forever so that the evil spirits wouldn't get him. ... An impression the rifle itself doesn't do much to dispel, really.
    1
  1869. Well, the sievert-to-rem equivalence, at least, is pretty easy, since the rem was retroactively defined as 0.01 sievert in 1976. :)
    1
  1870. I love the idea that in 1945, a ratchet wrench was still such gee-whiz high technology that it required a specific bit of an instructional film to explain what it does. :)
    1
  1871. Amazingly, all those replies and no one realized that it goes back to mechanical typewriters. As in, from before they were even electrical. It took significant force to engage the shift lock* mechanism in one of those, and not every typist could manage it with just the left pinky finger (statistically the weakest finger on the majority of people), so the key had to be wide enough to get two fingers onto it. As for why it's still that way today: for the same reason that telephone keypads are inverted from calculator keypads. 'Cause That's Just the Way It's Done.™ * not caps lock in those days--"shift" literally shifted the whole typebar apparatus, so locking it would also lock in, for instance, the symbols on the number row
    1
  1872. Mathematically impossible if the pads really are only used once. (See also: Project VENONA)
    1
  1873. The thing about the Google real-time translator app made me giggle uncontrollably, because it brought back memories of the InRange video where Ian tried to use it to figure out what the hell the food in a Russian MRE was. "This is... With Beef. Salt Ouch With Beef. It might be Spicy Pond." The web version of Google Translate may be better than the inline mobile one, but it's still got a long way to go. Some languages are better than others. For instance, any romance language and the Germanic ones usually come out pretty well, but translate any passage of Japanese longer than two or three words and holy cow. It's 1980s VCR instructions all over again. In other matters, I confess I have a Judge (actually I have two, because, amazingly, Taurus partnered with Rossi to make a carbine version of it), but I wish to place it on record that the Internet had nothing to do with that decision. I simply saw the handgun version in a shop one day and thought, "That is ridiculous. I must have it." :) The carbine naturally followed once I found out that they had made one, because who doesn't love a revolving carbine?
    1
  1874. I would just like to point out that "Justin Bieber got arrested" scans to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song.
    1
  1875. Do hunters rage? It seems like that would make for less effective hunting.
    1
  1876. I admire your forebearance. I'm not sure I have it in me to be calm and polite to someone who's been shooting at me. Hopefully I'll never have to find out... Back in the mid-'90s, I was at an indoor range north of San Jose, California--not quite in Silicon Valley, but quite near it--when a group of people from Toshiba came in. And when I say Toshiba, I mean all of them except the unfortunate young woman acting as their tour guide were from the corporate mothership in Tokyo. They were all middle-aged executives who were over for some kind of conference at a local branch office, and they had demanded to go shooting as their post-conference Recreational Activity. For background, I should note (on the off chance that there's someone reading this who doesn't already know) that firearms are very heavily regulated in Japan and have been since the end of World War II, but they are also hugely popular in Japanese pop culture. These guys had probably never handled or even seen a handgun in person before, but they were all very excited to try them out and clearly reckoned they'd already learned everything they needed to know from gangster movies. They were terrifyingly incompetent and having the absolute time of their lives. Those of us who were there when they arrived just sort of cowered in our lanes and hoped the dividers were sturdier than they probably were, because these guys were very excited and had no conception of "keep your muzzle downrange". Amazingly, they didn't manage to shoot anyone, but after gently admonishing them about their behavior (through their absolutely mortified local office employee, who was acting as interpreter) several times, the range master had eventually had enough of their nonsense and threw them out. In fairness, I have to say they took it well. They gave the impression that they didn't quite understand what they had done wrong, but knew they had offended the management somehow, and left politely, without a fuss. Postscript: I'm pretty sure the range master got a date with their tour guide before she herded them all back to the van. :)
    1
  1877. Also: Dammit, Ian. Now I've gone and bought one of those things.
    1
  1878. I'm surprised that sort of shifter is still legal, given that they have a documented track record of causing occasionally-fatal accidents.
    1
  1879. I miss NACA ducts on cars. We should bring them back.
    1
  1880.  @akatripclaymore.9679  Fair enough. Although, relatively lightweight or not, I still wouldn't want to get an M1's stock upside my head. ... OK, the paratrooper version is less intimidating in that regard, I grant you.
    1
  1881. Real top-break revolvers have similar problems, as it happens. They're really not meant to be opened like that, but people can't resist doing it, and over time everything gets out of whack--particularly since it's an archaic design, so the survivors nowadays tend to be at least a century old and have a lot of mileage on them.
    1
  1882. The "I enjoyed... well, this isn't really a film you enjoy as such" part made me think of my reaction to Schindler's List. An amazing piece of filmmaking, a really important story, I'm glad that I've seen it, and I never need to see it again.
    1
  1883. A 2x scale M1 carbine would only be the size of a full-grown rifle. :)
    1
  1884. I have a distinct memory of Grant screaming "HWACHAAAAA!!!!" during the hwacha episode, but I rewatched it a couple years ago and it wasn't in there. So maybe that never happened? But if it had, it would've been on this list.
    1
  1885. "The cost of ownership hasn't been awful." Well, there's a glowing testimonial.
    1
  1886. The defroster switch is raised because that way the panel is symmetrical. It matches the bezel around the cigarette lighter, which is presumably on the other side in the RHD models. Come on, Doug, you were just talking about that two minutes before, everything on the dash is symmetrical. ;) (Anyway, you say the centrally mounted window switches are cheap, I say they're genius. Find another car where the front passenger can control the rear windows! It made for more efficient division of labor for all those suburban parents who bought one of these, mistakenly thinking it would be cooler than a minivan.)
    1
  1887. "None of its features are outdated," says someone about a car with a cassette player...
    1
  1888. Nice! Looking at the new list, it must have taken ages to do all that rearranging. (I was surprised to find that your WWI Trench Shotgun video is not on the "YouTube dislikes" playlist. If anything you've made was deemed Not Suitable for Advertising, I would've bet on that one. :) In the unlikely event that you get bored with all that research and want to do even more curation, InRange could use the same touch at some point. It'd be great to have a proper playlist grouping up the 2017 WWSD videos (there's a third-party one, but it seems to be in the wrong order), and we kinda need a one-stop list for all of Karl's shitposts too. ;) Stay safe!
    1
  1889. Gotta have something to fall back on after the Reticulans shoot down all the satellites. You have to figure it'll be the first thing they do.
    1
  1890. Welcome to 1964!
    1
  1891. "Most Aston Martin owners will never even open their hood." Come on, Doug, you had an Aston Martin, you know that's not true. ... Well, unless you figure that's because they'll have People for that.
    1
  1892.  @FalloutJack  That would be epic in every way. "Well, it looks like even the mighty 10-gauge isn't quite up to the threat this thing poses... so I'd say it's time to break out the PUNT GUN."
    1
  1893. Not-necessarily-flattering unofficial nicknames are a feature of Western military aviation as well--for example, among its operators, the B-52 bomber is not commonly known by the name on its driver's license, Stratofortress, but rather as BUFF, an acronym standing for Big Ugly Fat... um... Fellow. ;) (And of course there is the A-10 Thunderbolt II, which, despite its perfectly good official name that relates it back to one of World War II's best-loved aircraft, is never ever called that in the wild, but always "Warthog".)
    1
  1894.  @nerd1000ify  "Aardvark" is a rare example of an unofficial nickname made good; the F-111 didn't have an official name when it was first introduced for some reason. It wasn't until later on, after one of the instructor pilots started calling it the Aardvark (for its long nose and habit of following the ground) and the name stuck, that the Air Force sort of shrugged and made it official. (As for "Pig", well, "aardvark" originally comes from the Afrikaans for "earth pig" anyway, so it works either way. :)
    1
  1895.  @nerd1000ify  Nope, never heard that one before! I'm not up to date with all that much that's gone on in military aviation after about 1995. :) Could be just because it's so much bigger than the regular Hornet...
    1
  1896. (looks at the subject line) OK, I have to see how even Doug can possibly have managed to make "no. next question" last nearly 13 minutes. :)
    1
  1897. I wouldn't trust that J.T. Frogblast guy near the vent core, I'm just saying.
    1
  1898. It bugs me out of all proportion to the actual seriousness of the problem that that electrical outlet doesn't have a cover plate on it. I'm just sayin'.
    1
  1899. Man, I've always wanted one of those. The six-wheeled amphibious ATV, I mean. The less-reliable Glock, not so much. :)
    1
  1900. Recent volcanoes are kind of... uh... dangerous.
    1
  1901. 3:38 I instinctively wanted to point first at my left earphone, then at my right. I may have been psychological scarred by the mandatory hearing test in second grade.
    1
  1902. Scott was tripped up by the fact that that's a higher-quality table with a better leg design than he's used to. :)
    1
  1903. It's just an odd stamping font. In the early '40s they went to a sans-serif one that was much clearer and easier to read.
    1
  1904. It reminds me of the old Bill Hicks riff about the drug dealer who only offered him glue. "I can afford heroin, you son of a bitch!"
    1
  1905. Also the flash of light inside the gel, which I believe is a bit of the material* heating to incandescence for a split-second. * or the air, yeah, didn't think of that
    1
  1906. I'm disappointed that the aftermath of the accident didn't cost the people responsible more than rebuilding the curve would have done. That would have been the perfect cherry on top of this particular shit sundae.
    1
  1907. You know, I'm beginning to get the impression that RORO ferries just aren't a good idea.
    1
  1908. Heck, I think I'll stick with the Uzi I don't even have.
    1
  1909. Another advantage the Reising has over the Thompson, not specified by Ian: doesn't have the Thompson's appalling length of pull.
    1
  1910. It makes a really satisfying noise.
    1
  1911. It may be worth noting that, when Robertson republished Futility in 1912 to--let's not mince words--cash in on the Titanic disaster, he edited it to make Titan more eerily similar to Titanic (increasing the fictional ship's tonnage to be closer to the real one's, and the like). He left in the polar bear fight, though, because why would any self-respecting thriller writer ever cut a polar bear fight? :)
    1
  1912. The fact that the people who were caught under it were there waiting for a traffic signal is nightmare fuel. Yesterday I was running some errands in the nearest semi-urban center, when I found myself at an intersection where you have to stop underneath the Interstate overpass to wait for one of the traffic lights that control the exit ramps. That overpass is a lot less fancy than the FIU bridge and it's been there for decades, but man, I hate that intersection. I only ended up at it this time because I forgot to route around it in a fit of absent-mindedness.
    1
  1913. Same. Same.
    1
  1914. The tape job reminded me of an old apple tree that used to be in my grandparents' back yard, decades ago. It split in a storm one day, and my grandfather tried to preserve it by trussing it back together with chains and what I think was an old fire hose. It held up that way for years, but after they sold that house, the new owners cut it down.
    1
  1915. 11:00 I used to work in product support for a now-long-defunct tech company called Livingston Enterprises, which made a communications server called the PortMaster. This was meant to be rack-mounted in the back rooms of Internet service providers' points of presence and never seen, and the first edition of the owner's manual contained detailed instructions for installing the rails and mounting it in a standard telecom rack. Then, on the next page, it said, DESKTOP INSTALLATION For desktop installation, place the PortMaster on a desk. And there was a little drawing of a PortMaster sitting on a desk.
    1
  1916. I really don't think I would be all that keen to have the chamber of a firearm that close to my face. I mean, sure, it's .22 Hornet, not .55 Boys or something, but even so.
    1
  1917. Hey, Ian, not apropos of this very cool prototype, but today is the day: my #FrenchRifleBook came in today's mail. Your pride in this accomplishment is fully justified. Chug some more champagne for me when you get a chance, as I cannot go and get any just at present. :)
    1
  1918. As an aside, the Canadian flag didn't look like that until 1965. In 1952 it was still the Canadian Red Ensign ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Red_Ensign ).
    1
  1919. Don't you get a lot of lint that way? My dryer vent spent a year or so with the hose unhooked from the back of the unit once, unbeknownst to me, and I couldn't figure out for ages why the room it was in was so dang dusty all the time.
    1
  1920.  @rationalist47  Infantry soldiers are rarely given a choice regarding a) what they wear on their feet or b) how far they have to walk in them...
    1
  1921. For what it's worth, mules are much smarter about not doing anything that might risk their lives than humans are.
    1
  1922. To be fair, I don't particularly want any gun in a confined space. Dang things are loud!
    1
  1923. It's a tiny thing, but I really enjoy the metric captions for the completely perverse reason that the capital M in, for example, "203 Mm" makes it claim that the TRX is 203 megameters wider than the standard truck. For reference, 203 million meters is a bit more than half of the average distance from the Earth to the Moon, and I know it's a big-ass pickup, but it only seems that wide. :)
    1
  1924. I seem to recall they tried to put the roof on when they did this car on Top Gear, back in the day. If that's the one I'm thinking of, it didn't go well. Sort of like trying to pitch the world's most expensive pup tent.
    1
  1925. I know its performance as a combat weapon remains a matter of much contention, but as a civilian shooter, I love the M1 carbine. Even in non-sporter form, it's just so... handleable. If that's a word.
    1
  1926. "Somebody tell me when a lack of maintenance becomes 'patina'." –Mark Novak
    1
  1927. That's one weird-looking Smill & Wilson clone. You'd never see them coming out of the factory in Sprangfeld like that.
    1
  1928. The case could be made that it was, in its original conception, a backup gun... but then, that can be said of most military handguns. :)
    1
  1929. https://wikizilla.org/wiki/Varan
    1
  1930. IHNJ, IJLS "Trounds".
    1
  1931. "A" Vector? Isn't there, like, one?
    1
  1932. 4:40 The speedometer is in km/h, but the odometer and fuel gauge are in miles. So either those two things are configurable separately, or they're just... like that. Either way, what the hell are you doing, Lamborghini? :)
    1
  1933.  @Panda-cute  In fairness to the Highway Division, the whale in question was already dead when they blew it up. It had beached itself and died some days before, and the authorities were worried that it would present a hazard to the public as it decomposed, but they also had no idea what to do about it. Pushing it back into the sea wouldn't help; the surf would just push it right back onto the beach. There were fears that if they dug a hole in the beach and tried to bulldoze the carcass in, it would come apart and make an even bigger mess. The decision to use dynamite was based on the (faulty, as it turned out) assumption that the whale would be essentially vaporized in the blast, and the remaining pieces would be small enough for seabirds to eat. In the event, all they managed to do was shower the beach and the crowd of curious onlookers with chunks of rotting blubber, one of which was big enough to crush the aforementioned car (which was parked quite some distance away). By blind luck, nobody was seriously hurt, but when the smoke cleared, most of the whale was still right where it had been, only now blown open--an even bigger mess than they were hoping to avert. Strangely, it only occurred to anyone that they could burn the carcass until after they'd tried to blow it up. The next time they had a beaching along that stretch of coast, a few years later, that's what they did (and the local authorities got a different agency to do it).
    1
  1934. I think I like the Clear Ballistics torsos a bit better. They're a little more... abstract, which makes the whole experience less uncanny.
    1
  1935. In the last few years, my father has indeed become that paranoid about electricity. He doesn't leave anything plugged in if it isn't in use, unless he has to because the plug is inaccessible (e.g., laundry machines). The microwave. The TV. Phone chargers. You name it, he unplugs it. Except for the one on his kitchen range, all the built-in digital clocks in his house are useless because he never leaves the things that own them plugged in. I unplug my toaster when I'm not using it, because I don't trust them on some instinctive level, but apart from that... (shrug)
    1
  1936.  @Falcodrin  The Tandy 1000 I had in high school used to do that sometimes. The local AM station would play very quietly from the built-in speaker when the computer wasn't even turned on. (I lived about half a mile from the transmitter.) Super creeped me out the first time I noticed it, until I figured out where the mysterious mumbling voice in the living room was coming from (and that what it was saying was the play-by-play of a baseball game :).
    1
  1937. I feel like the utility of these things would be almost entirely psychological. I mean, if a man actually did fire it into a crowd dense enough to hit anyone with it and hostile enough that he would want to shoot them, he'd wound or kill up to four of them, and then the other 200 would overrun his position and beat him to death.
    1
  1938.  @automation7295  Eh?
    1
  1939. "Think of it like trepanning in reverse." So... UN-drilling a hole in your skull? (Yes, I know that term also has a usage in machining, but that's not where my thought process went when my eye fell upon it, and for a second I was very confused. :)
    1
  1940. Not only did Scott's flagship not have a CIC, they were developed specifically in response to the command-and-control screwups in the various battles of the Guadalcanal campaign.
    1
  1941. This makes the third such occasion that I can think of off the top of my head.
    1
  1942. You had one job, lantern man.
    1
  1943. A lot of science fiction is set not so much in the future as in (the creators' idea of) a cooler version of the time when it was made.
    1
  1944. My favorite feature of that pump-action is its preposterous length. It's like a Civil War infantry rifle grew up to be a modern pump-action shotgun.
    1
  1945. Neato. I completely agree that there's something immensely satisfying about these old pig-iron SLRs. I've got my mother's old Minolta SR-T 201, which was one of this camera's direct competitors and is very like it in a great many respects. (The 201 is the 1975 updated version of the SR-T 101 that has an integral flash hot shoe on top of the viewfinder and, amusingly, the "memo holder" thing on the back cover, which, given the timing, I bet was copied straight from the F-1.) Even the battery... door? Port? Hatch? for the light meter battery is very similar. The reticle for the light meter is slightly different, but works on basically the same principle.
    1
  1946. "We May Not Have Taken Everything Into Consideration" could have been ArmaLite's company motto, if it wasn't "Bad Timing Every Time". AR-5? Designed as a crew gun for a fleet of bombers that were never built. AR-10? Too far ahead of its time, but not far enough ahead to outrun the old boy procurement network. AR-15? Got discouraged by the AR-10's failure, sold the rights juuust before it became insanely lucrative for someone else.
    1
  1947. Always been partial to the R32, myself. (In Gran Turismo. I've never seen one in person, obviously, because I am an ordinary scrub. :) Also, this is the only car I've ever seen that's upholstered in gardening gloves.
    1
  1948. Scott's laughter makes funny things even funnier.
    1
  1949. I had an '04 Grand Prix that did the same speedometer trick. Always fun to discreetly poke it when the passenger was sneaking a look at the speedo. The section about driving in snow should just say, "Don't. This is a Corvette, you fool." :)
    1
  1950. Fun video! It's always fun to see those old French battleships. Personally, though, I think you just wanted another excuse to say "Johan van Oldenbarnevelt". :)
    1
  1951. Local Pronunciation Corner: Here in Maine, Winter Harbor is pronounced "winnahaaba". ;)
    1
  1952. "Shooter, do you understand the course of fire?" "I do!" "Do you understand why you have chosen this gun?" "I do not!"
    1
  1953. 1:06 Hi, this is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message, I'll get back to you. Universal Pictures used the aptly named "Universal Ring" in everything for years and years and years. Vinyl, hell, I wouldn't be surprised if it was on an Edison cylinder. :)
    1
  1954. Wait, why am I holding my breath? That's not going to help at all.
    1
  1955. You're right, needs a bipod. :)
    1
  1956. Pontiac addressed this problem with the directional wheels on the 2005 Grand Prix GT2 by just selling them with four of the same ones, so that they were going "forward" on the driver's side and "backward" on the passenger side. Source: I had one. :)
    1
  1957. "Can I shave your sanitary?" "I beg your pardon, madam?"
    1
  1958. "Now ist ze time on Schprockets vhen ve actuate ze schtriker!"
    1
  1959. I remember reading somewhere that Saive included the magazine safety in the GP35 because it was a requirement for the French Army pistol trials... and then the French didn't adopt the GP35, so, thanks for that, France.
    1
  1960. Yup, no surprises here (but plenty of entertainment). Back in the day, before independent grenade launcher attachments were a thing, infantry rifle grenades were fired from muzzle adapters of one kind or another using blank cartridges. If the gas from one of those can fling a small bomb a couple hundred yards, it can certainly do a number on nearby meat and bone. (As far as the shotgun blanks go, keep in mind that unlike the rifle- and pistol-caliber ones, those did still have a projectile of sorts. That cardboard disc at the end gets going at quite a fair clip with that much expanding gas behind it...)
    1
  1961. Man, normally when we talk about an industrial product having been "nailed together" at the factory, we're being facetious, but... warlord-era China! Let's go! (BTW, it sounded like there was meant to be an inset at 4:02, but nothing appeared...)
    1
  1962. What's weird is that looks uncannily like a '90s General Motors head unit. The display font is super-distinctive. Is tha an owner mod, I wonder, or was Chrysler discreetly buying stereos from AC Delco in '01?
    1
  1963. So... is the ECT PWR button not covered in the documentation, or has literally no Toyota owner ever just bothered to look it up? I mean, you don't even need to be someone who reads manuals for fun to think of that. Is it like BMW owners and turn signals? It's there, but no one who has one has ever thought to use it?
    1
  1964.  @niceguy191  Exactly! What kind of unwarrantedly extravagant behavior is that, anyway? (Also, I knew someone was going to quibble about what kind of fans they were...)
    1
  1965. "He is apparently a dog." Just hitting me with that straight out of the gate was unfair. :)
    1
  1966.  @laurenwasinger9436  I remember reading a book, ages ago, that included a character named Ruthven Bicester-Strachan, which said character was forever explaining is pronounced "riven bister strawn". And English people accuse the French of leaving half the letters unvoiced. :)
    1
  1967. Volume 2: Austal
    1
  1968. Is "Persian" a typo for "Klingon"?
    1
  1969. When I was in middle school, I had a project in science class to build a scale model of a skeletal building, then stack calibrated weights on top until the structure collapsed. There was a small prize for the student whose building held the most weight. The Sampoong management's habit of steadily adding more and more weight high up in the building reminds me of that process. It feels almost deliberate, like if the building hadn't collapsed, their next move would have been to add something else to the upper floors--something nice and lightweight, like a car dealership or a construction equipment showroom.
    1
  1970. I remember the "shipping and receiving" videos at Rock Island! At the distance they were at, the mic you used in those days made the tape pulling sound uncannily like impact drivers, which gave the whole thing the feel that you were filming next door to a tire and muffler shop. :)
    1
  1971. No surprise that special forces guys like these. I've read MACVSOG memoirs in which those operators made their own super-short shotguns (usually double-barrels for mechanical simplicity, but still) to carry as backup backup guns. You know, for when your sawed-off RPD is out of ammo, some impolite SOB's mortar shrapnel has broken your CAR-15 backup gun, and you're out of grenades, but not desperate enough to haul out your BHP backup backup backup gun or your suppressed .22 backup backup backup backup gun yet. :)
    1
  1972. There's a Julius Fučík joke here somewhere, but at the risk of seeming to be making it at the expense of the tug operators rather than the pilots, I'll refrain.
    1
  1973. If I had one of these, I would propose it to ATF for premature inclusion on the C&R list, reasoning: it's rare, it's interesting, and nobody who wants one wants it for actually-being-a-gun purposes. "Any other firearms which derive a substantial part of their monetary value from the fact that they are novel, rare, bizarre, or because of their association with some historical figure, period, or event." I submit to you that this qualifies, gentlemen.
    1
  1974. Huh, I have that same thought process whenever I have what seems like a narrow escape (e.g., not quite getting into what would've been a nasty traffic accident): "Welp, OK, this is the timeline where I didn't just die, that's nice."
    1
  1975. Pish-tosh, dear boy and/or girl. In the days when cartridges like .455 Webley and .577 Spencer were developed, the English still scorned the metric system as so much subversive French claptrap. Rather, a lot of early cartridges and their descendants use peculiarly sized bullets because they were developed to be used in converted muzzle-loading firearms, which historically had bore sizes based on all sorts of arcane systems of measurement. Sometimes, as with the modern .38 Special cartridge, they don't even have bullets of the actual diameter mentioned in their names, because of the weird evolutions their ancestors went through in the mid-1800s. Somewhat related to the above, the gauge of a shotgun barrel is--hang onto your hat for this one--the number of spheres of that barrel's inside diameter you can make from one pound of lead. So, for instance, a 12-gauge (or "12-bore" if it's a rifle, though rifles that big aren't really a thing any more) has a barrel of a diameter such that 12 lead balls that size would weigh a pound. Hey, it made sense to English gunsmiths. :) (.410 is the outlier there, in that even though it's a shotgun cartridge, the number refers to a nominal bore diameter in decimal inches, so technically ".410 gauge" is incorrect.)
    1
  1976.  @clearsailing7993  No, I was just in an imperial mood because of the subject. :)
    1
  1977. I can only picture this rifle being invented by someone who sat bolt upright out of a sound sleep at about 4 AM, shouted "Great Scott!" and reported immediately to the workshop.
    1
  1978. Is that three feet shorter than an actual Mini Cooper, or three feet shorter than one of the BMW extended dance remix Minis? It's an important distinction, 'cause those are gigantic compared to the original (which was still in production when the AZ-1 was made!). Also, it's a common misconception that that circular area under the front hood was originally for the spare tire. It's not, it's dedicated Baumkuchen storage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumkuchen
    1
  1979. In fairness, Clarkson didn't coin that phrase, and the time I can think of him saying it on air, he was doing his Parody American voice and being pretty clearly ironic.
    1
  1980.  @RamArt9091  And get you put on a list, too.
    1
  1981. So basically, someone looked at a captive-bolt livestock killer and thought, I bet I could play golf with this. Out-of-the-box thinking!
    1
  1982. technical term watch: "sploops"
    1
  1983. Note: The independent United States Air Force didn't exist until 1947, two years after the end of World War II. At the time Buchanan Field was expropriated for war use, the organization responsible was still part of the Army (specifically the U.S. Army Air Forces Fourth Air Force).
    1
  1984. You guys have fun with your arguments, I'm just going to savor the mental image of a battleship equipped with sixteen-FOOT guns as specified in the original post. :)
    1
  1985. I don't know exactly why, but it tickles me when big dogs are timid and tiny dogs are fierce. Something about the contrast. I used to know someone who had a Rottweiler; Max was the most intimidating-looking dog in the world, and also the biggest coward. :)
    1
  1986. Whenever I see an Italian-language car manual (which admittedly isn't all that often), I think of Clarkson trying to figure out how to open the fuel flap on a Lamborghini in one of the old Top Gear road films. "'Consola centrale con... interatore aperture sportello... rifornimento.' We are useless Italians and we haven't built this properly."
    1
  1987. Could've been worse--could've been a V12 XJS. :)
    1
  1988. Here's the thing I particularly love about this specific Senna: Someone went into a McLaren dealership, ordered the most expensive car they've ever made with options that cost as much as a normal expensive car all by themselves, and then, asked what color their new 200-mile-an-hour, million-plus-dollar, insane angled teenage-Japanese-tuner-winged window-bedecked hyperfuturemobile should be, replied with a perfectly serious face, "Grey."
    1
  1989. A SPIW prototype right next to a Dardick. Was that the Cabinet of Failure? (N.B. If I were the curator of a firearms museum, I would absolutely have a Cabinet of Failure. Possibly an entire Room of Failure.)
    1
  1990. Can confirm, obtaining an 03 (C&R) FFL is a financially disastrous decision fraught with peril. Only consider it if you live alone and have no one to whom you have to explain the disappearance of all of your filthy United States dollars. In re the pom-pom, I'll just note that reports from the British volunteer regiments in the Second South African War often noted the morale impact of the fact that the Boers had them, so there is at least a documented psywar effect. Whether that's worth having the things around is debatable, but people seem to have disproportionately noticed being shot at by them, at any rate. :)
    1
  1991. Where does the Japanese government come into it? Is the shipping line a nationalized concern? (Genuine question, I don't know.)
    1
  1992. Oh, nice. I had the Pontiac version of this car (or, well, of the Regal, anyway). Very similar in many respects, but I always liked that stripped-down look they gave the Grand National--although they kind of spoiled all their own effort at making the car subtle by putting those wheels on it. (Also, you think those door mirrors are small, you should see the ones on my '62 Impala. They're circular, and about the size of the top view of a coffee mug. :) As an aside, that logo on the seat belt buckle is officially the General Motors Mark of Excellence. I'm not making that up.
    1
  1993. When I was in college in the early '90s, my dorm had to be evacuated one day because one of the kids on another floor had a live Mk 2 grenade (the classic WWII "pineapple" frag grenade) in his room. He claimed he bought it at a flea market and thought it was one of those deactivated ones army-navy stores (used to?) sell as paperweights. Since he was also in the habit of threatening to take a shotgun to people he disagreed with (even though, to be fair, there was no evidence that he had one), the campus police did not believe him.
    1
  1994. For those who may not know, this gadget is a modern take on quite an old idea, and its ancestors from the 1800s generally had zero safety features. (To be fair, they also used vastly less powerful cartridges.) I feel like those 19th-century manufacturers would have appreciated the chutzpah of trying to pass this one off as a medical device, though. :)
    1
  1995. My grandfather was an Army Reserve officer and competitive marksman in the '50s and '60s. He's never been much for stories of his time in uniform, but I do recall him allowing a couple of times as how he did not feel the adoption of the M14 was particularly helpful. :)
    1
  1996.  @SomeRPGFan  Law & Order: Infrastructure Inspection Unit
    1
  1997. Boy, the French really liked their foldy-uppy magazine wells on their SMGs, didn't they?
    1
  1998.  @boredandagitated  On all the ones I've seen, you have to flip the magazine down, then push it the rest of the way in and work the bolt to chamber the first round, like after a normal reload. The magazines have two catch notches on them, one for the stowed position and one for all the way in.
    1
  1999. Oh hey, Jonathan is filming today in the "guns, lots of guns" room from The Matrix. Neat.
    1
  2000. Xena's expression at the end suggests that she has made careful note of each and every one of these indignities. Be on your guard. :)
    1
  2001. 3:02 Missed opportunity to say "Give peas a chance!" :)
    1
  2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning
    1
  2003.  @tigerbalmespresso  In fairness to Doug, all branding is a form of latent brainwashing (and thiiiis is definitely part of his brand at this point). :)
    1
  2004. It seems like the gun itself is a lot less unwieldy in action, but the accountants can't have been happy about the much-increased chances that operatives would lose their very expensive spy briefcases. :)
    1
  2005. The janky trip display reminds me of '90s Saabs, which also had something very like that. The one in my '97 900S amazingly never failed while I had the car (and I had it for more than 10 years), but my friend's first-generation 9-3--i.e., the same car, a couple of years newer--had lost so many pixels by the time the car was paid off that it looked like it was in Martian.
    1
  2006. Ian getting whacked on the eyebrow by his own brass reminds me of the time I had a 9mm case fall into the gap between my glasses and my face, slightly burning my eyelid. That would have been an interesting one to explain to the eye doctor if I hadn't blinked. Be like Ian, kids! Make sure your glasses fit better than mine did.
    1
  2007. "My face is my shield!" —Victorian machine gunner
    1
  2008. Everyone else puts things they want to protect from nuclear events in caves. The Swiss, ever efficient, simply went and put the nuclear event in a cave. Smart!
    1
  2009. My least comfortable handgun is my 1895 Nagant. It's fine if you're just holding it, but trying to actuate the trigger without some kind of winch or windlass arrangement is a silly idea. :)
    1
  2010. The thing about British intelligence pretending to be ship salvagers reminds me of how Lockheed got hold of the titanium needed to build the SR-71: by buying it from the Soviets through a series of CIA front companies.
    1
  2011. My favorite thing about the design of the Welrod is that the grip is literally just a pistol magazine (1903 Colt Pocket Hammerless, I think?) stuffed through a piece of rubber.
    1
  2012. Oh hey, that's the Paul Bunyan statue in Bangor, Maine. My old hometown (or at least the place closest to it that had a movie theater)! :)
    1
  2013. I don't know what you're talking about, saying you can see why this didn't catch on. Who wouldn't want a revolver that ejects one live round and four out of five spent cases per loaded cylinder, and blasts combustion gas back toward your face and hands in the process? Those are the two things people have been clamoring for their revolvers to be able to do since 1873. Just another example of Colt's incompetent management completely misreading the market.
    1
  2014. The root answer to questions 2 and 3 is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in short: things fall apart.
    1
  2015. Ah, I see it was Throw Your Daughter Under the Bus Day for Mercedes owner no. 1. Classy!
    1
  2016.  @trainer1158  This is so. My father's late Yorkie, Harry, weighed maybe eight pounds and would absolutely have tried to fight a bear if he'd ever had the opportunity.
    1
  2017. "Tney told us all they wanted was a sound that could kill someone from a distance, so we go ahead, and the meters are over in the red..."
    1
  2018. I've got one of the special two-level desks from my old high school's typewriting classroom--they stopped offering the course and sold off all the stuff at the end of my senior year (1990–91). Sadly, as in your school's case, the typewriters were too used up to be worth snagging one of those too, but the desk has served me well for many years. The lower part where the typewriter was meant to go is the perfect spot to put a printer, which seems appropriate.
    1
  2019. When you get a chance, check out the Museum of the Arms Industry in Eibar ( https://armia-eibar.eus/ ) - I found an old catalog there that helped me identify my own Spanish mystery revolver (which turns out to be a Trocaola, Aranzabal y Cía copy of a Smith & Wesson Victory in 8mm French Ordnance, presumably made as part of a contract for the French Army in WWI). They might have something similar kicking around their collection for the company that made this one. Mine has the dubious distinction of being the oddest thing in my cabinet of curiosities. The people who sold it to me thought the badly kerned "TROCAOLAARAMZABALYCIA" roll stamp on the barrel was the usual Mystery Pistol Gibberish and had marked it "CHINESE?? S&W VICTORY COPY - .32 S&W???" (And yes, that is not a typo, or at least it's not MY typo - Trocaola, Aranzabal & Co. spelled their own name "Aramzabal" in their roll stamp. Quality was not Job 1 when they were working on that French contract, evidently. :)
    1
  2020. @duckyfluff3886 If I learned anything from graduate school, it's that if a thing is worth thinking, it's worth overthinking. YouTube comments reinforce this conclusion every day. :)
    1
  2021. Re-watching this video, I noticed a detail about the operation of this gun that made me wonder: If you forget to wind the bolt crank back after opening it, does it whirl violently around when you release the bolt? That seems to be in line, in terms of the piece's ergonomic philosophy, with the "don't put your hand in the obvious place or the ejecting case will take it away" problem. :)
    1
  2022. My grandfather (Army Reserve, 1952-1968) used to say that he liked the M3A1 best of all the full-auto small arms available at the time; he was into precision marksmanship, so he preferred the Garand, but, as he noted, the grease gun's rate of fire meant that at least you couldn't waste ammo as fast with it as you could with, say, an M14. :)
    1
  2023. I have no joke, I just like saying "Velodog".
    1
  2024. Indeed you can't! He died in 2013.
    1
  2025. I wonder if that storage compartment beside the rear seat is because it's the same size seat as in the back of a normal E-class, but the 500E is wider.
    1
  2026. There's a gun in my collection that I think illustrates this problem quite well. Back in the '90s, a company down in Texas made a Luger clone in stainless steel. Unfortunately, as many of you may know but they apparently didn't, stainless steel isn't a drop-in replacement for regular steel in mechanisms with moving parts and bearing surfaces. So even if they had the entire Luger TDP (and they probably didn't), if all they did was make the parts to the original specs, it was never going to function properly... as indeed it does not, and never has, even after it went back to the factory for modifications shortly after I bought it.
    1
  2027. That CO₂ bottle looks like the kind of thing that would run a home beverage carbonator for a month. I'm not sure I'd be entirely comfortable using it as a shoulder stock. :)
    1
  2028. I like that Cadillac has chosen to commemorate the end of the Ford Taurus by making the last CTS look just like it. That's the kind of sentimental nod to a fallen competitor you see far too infrequently in this callous day and age.
    1
  2029. You wouldn't think that insane B-pillar placement was no big deal if you weren't such a beanpole, Douglas. There are a few other small 4-door cars set up that way nowadays (the late-model Ford Focus comes to mind), and those of us with a bit of avoirdupois hate trying to maneuver around those damn things. Probably decent protection in a side impact, though, I grant you.
    1
  2030. "Northern Inuit" seems a bit redundant, considering. :)
    1
  2031. That gas system looks like it came from Home Depot, and was originally meant to connect the hot water tap on one of those fancy bathroom sinks that's designed to look like a mixing bowl sitting on a coffee table. :)
    1
  2032. The thing that makes me doubt the basketball story is that two extra gallons of gas in a 1960s stock car would get it about another hundred yards,* which doesn't really seem worth the trouble. *that's a joke, "actually" squad
    1
  2033. 720 owners worldwide look forward to the day the motor for that mobile gauge cluster fails halfway along, and their friendly local McLaren service department has a chance to earn an extra $20,000.
    1
  2034. The Allanté deal always reminds me of the old Dennis Miller riff about two-for-one sales. "If they really want to screw you, they'll give you three of these things."
    1
  2035. Firearms not to attempt this technique with: Luger.
    1
  2036. This reminds me of a joke one of the guys who worked in the paper mill we used to have in town told me years ago, the punch line of which is, "Don't You touch me, Jesus! I'm on disability!"
    1
  2037. I think the clause of the Constitution prohibiting ex post facto laws has been ruled inapplicable to civil (as opposed to criminal) matters, but don't quote me. I'm not a lawyer either, just a guy who thinks he remembers reading that somewhere.
    1
  2038. He reminds me of a comic I saw long ago about a hypothetical conversation between a pack of wolves and a sheepdog, who for some reason the artist chose to render speaking in a Scots accent. "Aye, likely the whole pack o' ye could kill me an' have the flock tae yerselves. But at least four o' ye won't make it tae the feast."
    1
  2039. Mr M M Don't buy one, then.
    1
  2040. One of these things in one hand, a Lancaster howdah pistol in the other, pipe clenched in teeth, tactical monocle well-screwed-in, doing battle with the dastardly invaders from Mars.
    1
  2041. How often do Norwegian Army rear-echelon personnel end up shooting Soviet paratroopers these days? I mean, you did say "intended purpose". :)
    1
  2042. Ian rocking the Zouave look would certainly complete a picture. :)
    1
  2043. "I'm gonna buy me a montage. "
    1
  2044. Oddly enough, my parents' Subaru GL (circa 1980) had a very similar gadget--down to the shapes of the lights in it, which makes me wonder if maybe Citroën and Subaru sourced them from the same electronics supplier.
    1
  2045. New York and Nevada are disappointed that you forgot about them.
    1
  2046. Are we entirely sure that the "cobra wrapped around the world" marking is not an indication that that particular M10 was purchased and issued by a certain supranational criminal organization?
    1
  2047. I guess they kept calling the rising triple tone "The Squeaky Wheel" because "Bad Day in the Cardiac Ward" is too many syllables.
    1
  2048. That .500 Magnum revolver reminded me of Danny Vermin's gun from Johnny Dangerously. "They made it special for him. It's an .88 Magnum. It shoots through schools!" (I wonder if a sentence that has both "shoots" and "schools" in it will hit some kind of red-flag match in the algorithm...)
    1
  2049. In favor of what? I don't think I've ever seen an alternative for infrastructure wire available in a builder supply place. Romex and off-brand clones thereof are it.
    1
  2050.  @TechnologyConnections  Aha. Gosh, residential electricians must love that rule, if homes in Chicagoland are built anything like they are here in Maine.
    1
  2051. "What many runners don't know is that not all dog breeds are good jogging partners." Greyhounds, for instance, unless you're Barry Allen. :)
    1
  2052. "What's that, Sledge? A silencer?" "Nah, my dad invented it. It's called a loudener."
    1
  2053. Casually dropping in that "'cause I haven't blown up the turbos yet"...
    1
  2054. Huh. I have a 1919 .32 Pocket Hammerless I'm very fond of, but I'm struck by the fact that they were trying to update/modernize/improve the gun in the '50s and yet didn't even slightly change the original design's most irritating feature--the fiddly disassembly procedure. Or even the REassembly procedure. I mean come on, guys, even a captive recoil spring, something to make it so you don't really need three hands. Work with future-me here. No? Oh well. Still, I suppose they weren't trying to develop an all-new gun. It's more sort of a Pocket Hammerless 1903A1. In that respect, if they made them today, I'd buy one. Or at least I'd routinely regret that they're too expensive, like I do with the Browning 1911-380. :)
    1
  2055. As I rewatch this video, one of YT's suggestions for me over on the right is a playlist entitled "clean vines for the children of jesus". So apparently even the algorithm is now on board with the "Gun Jesus" thing.
    1
  2056. Little-known fact: That license plate indicates that it's only legal to drive that car on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.* Also, now I'm having flashbacks to the No Reservations episode where Anthony Bourdain went to Namibia and the bushmen fixed him some lightly grilled warthog rectum. I thought I had erased those memory sectors, but here we are. * this part is a lie
    1
  2057. My favorite ridiculous combination tool is still the WWI Canadian shovel shield. I mean... what?
    1
  2058. Huh. Aren't Terminators nuclear-powered? So when they melted down the one in Terminator 2 in that steel mill... (parallel-universe Plainly Difficult video ensues! :)
    1
  2059. A thousand grains of black powder in two of those cartridges. That's just over two and a quarter ounces, or around 65 grams. A sufficiently skillful person could probably open a good-sized safe with that.
    1
  2060. (looks at title) Well, "top secret" for values of top secret that include the entire ATF program being extensively covered in Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine and Blackbird making YF-23 t-shirts, anyway.
    1
  2061. Well, I mean, it's not a Toyota HiAce...
    1
  2062. Heck, they made a van version of the old Mini, which was hilarious, since the old Mini wasn't big enough to get more than about five TV dinners into the back of even as a van. :)
    1
  2063. Doubly impressive in the Dramatic Slo-Mo bits. :)
    1
  2064. "Not everybody would understand, but older people definitely know that one." Oh god... I'm 'older people'.
    1
  2065. Unfortunately, this innovation would do nothing to address the Thompson's other major ergonomic fault--in fact, if anything, the stretched receiver would make its astonishing length of pull even worse. Great news about Jonathan and Dave working together again! I was quite sad to see Firearms Expert Reacts go the way of so much superior content in this bleak and savage decade.
    1
  2066. That's a zombie hardhat diver, not a zombie scuba di--(harpooned)
    1
  2067. +ERIC & CINDY Crowder Ah, is that what it was. I knew there were cars made at that same period that didn't have them, but either didn't know or forgot about the airbag part of it. (It was incompletely enforced in the late '80s, anyway; I had an '89 Camaro that didn't have either one.)
    1
  2068. +K3NNY O Ah, see, my friend's Tempo was like ASSUME THE POSITION, SONNY and the motor would keep pulling furiously until someone intervened. To make matters worse, the Tempo's release thing didn't actually disconnect the belt, it just disabled the retractor reel so that you had a couple feet of slack. Such a bad system. But then, that was Ford in the '80s. They couldn't even get paint right half the time back then.
    1
  2069. In general, based on the various case studies I've seen here and elsewhere from the last 40 to 50 years, I would say that the principal lesson that needs to be learned by anyone who is looking to enter the field of handgun manufacture appears to be, "Don't."
    1
  2070.  @spjr99  ... so to speak.
    1
  2071. Reminds me of that exchange between J and K in the first Men in Black movie. "Is it worth it?" "Oh yeah, it's worth it. If you're strong enough."
    1
  2072.  @Spudz76  heyoooooo
    1
  2073. The C.DIFF dial amuses me, since that's also what doctors call Clostridium difficile, a bacterial infection you really don't want to have, for short.
    1
  2074. This looks like it would be Gomez Addams's prized hunting piece.
    1
  2075. The .jp version of the Honda CR-Z had comedy rear seats, too. When the time came to fit it out for the US market, though, they looked back there and said, "... Nah," so the US ones just had a black plastic cargo tray and a sort of fake seatback to provide a sound baffle between the front seats and the cargo compartment. :) What was that orange cylinder thing in the passenger footwell of the Sera?
    1
  2076. Maybe it's just an artifact of the mic used, or the video's sound codec, or whatever, but "Calm Sea Waves" sounds like some kind of catastrophic accident in a glass factory to me. I don't think I would find that particularly soothing. (Also, "listen to soothing sounds while you drive your car" strikes me as a really bad plan. I tend to want things that won't lull me to sleep when I'm, you know, operating several tons of speeding metal.)
    1
  2077. I think the most impressive thing here is that at 12:36, you can clearly see the wadding from the first slug shot arriving an instant after the slug blows through the door, and even that is moving fast enough to make a massive dent. Imagine actually firing one of these things from a boat, as designed (which is where the "punt" in the name comes from).
    1
  2078. Yeah, they... they do that. I remember Ian had one on Forgotten Weapons many years ago, and that one jammed so often and so thoroughly that he finally broke it trying to clear it.
    1
  2079. "If you want this pin to be captive, you can(not)."
    1
  2080. The climate controls are positioned like that on purpose. Only the captain of the starship is authorized to adjust the life support system.
    1
  2081. No, but I remember when the M5 was the prototype starship computer of the future.
    1
  2082. I can think of one film there's a real magazine in: the original RoboCop. In the convenience store robbery scene, the robber passes a rack of real Marvel comics and grabs an issue of Iron Man to take to the counter. Oddly, it's issue 142, which suggests that either the store hasn't updated its magazine stock in a very long time, or RoboCop is set in 1980. :)
    1
  2083. Why, one's private island, obviously.
    1
  2084. Interestingly (to me, anyway), the French one is marked in Franglais--"LE PROTECTOR", not "THE PROTECTOR" or "LE PROTECTEUR".
    1
  2085. HMS Habakkuk would have been unsinkable, had she been built. Ice kind of can't help but float on water. :)
    1
  2086. I remember seeing the gold damascened option on the Llama pistols in Shooter's Bible back in the '80s and wondering how it was done... and how many of them they actually sold.
    1
  2087. Yeah, a lot of things about this car seem like they are the specific answer to the question, "Why don't they make cars like this?" :) (Not that it's not cool, just... there are functional, everyday reasons why ordinary cars are like they are and not, well, like this.)
    1
  2088. John: "... would only be the tip of the deadly iceberg." My brain, automatically: "No, the lettuce outbreak was a different one." Dammit, brain, you have one job.
    1
  2089. I see people comparing the rules jockeying involved with this gun to Formula 1, but it reminds me more of Can-Am racing in the '70s, specifically the controversy around the Chaparral 2J "fan car" (which was banned specifically because teams other than Chaparral complained to the SCCA that their own cars' inability to beat it would make the sport "boring"). To be fair, the same thing did happen in Formula 1 a few years later, but Can-Am got there first. :)
    1
  2090. Have you checked to make sure it hasn't been transported to the past for use in a video? It could happen!
    1
  2091. It took me a while to figure out who your technique with the kettlebell reminded me of. Remember Monica Seles, the tennis player? :)
    1
  2092. And so does his dad.
    1
  2093. Re the second point: That may be the case in more recent gen-2 model years (I don't know, I haven't bothered to look it up), but in model year 2018, the RTL trim level didn't have either of those things. (Source: I have one, and it doesn't.)
    1
  2094.  @pm270x  That's not what you said, though; you said "all of the 2nd generation Ridgeline" have them, which is not the case.
    1
  2095. That hypothetical modern ten-year-old's formative experience will be in software rather than hardware, that's all. It's different, but not necessarily less valid.
    1
  2096. Let's see if we can keep the vintage GM minivan energy going! See if you can find a Pontiac Montana. The Existential Cowboy deserves to be remembered. "Maybe it's not really a minivan."
    1
  2097. . o O { any American submarine before the Sargo class }
    1
  2098. The phrase "killed in 1997 in a shootout with his car" gives me a completely different mental image from what actually happened. It's possible I watched too many Transformers cartoons as a kid.
    1
  2099. It's not so much that they're not moving as that they no longer have one or two thousand full-time maintenance personnel apiece, living aboard 24-7 with virtually unlimited supplies and not much else to do besides scrape and paint.
    1
  2100. Oh man, my grandfather bought one of those three-wheeled Honda ATVs when they came out. Everybody in the family rolled it at least once. In hindsight, it's kind of amazing none of us was seriously hurt.
    1
  2101. Relatable. I was made in 1973 and I don't feel that old either, except on the increasingly frequent days when my back goes out on me.
    1
  2102. What a shitshow. The setup for this thing is like something out of an episode of Police Squad! Picture Frank Drebin explaining how it went down to his boss. "Well, some guys were welding near the stash of fireworks stored next to the 2,000 tons of abandoned high-explosive precursor--you know, that came off that rustbucket freighter the shady Russo-Cypriot businessman abandoned here 10 years ago?" And the Chief nods sagely, as if nothing in the sentence Frank just uttered was in any way bizarre. (Mind you, it looks like the Beiruti authorities may not have an investigator of Frank Drebin's caliber to put on the case, but even so.)
    1
  2103. Huh. There used to be one of these around where I live. It was hard to miss, since it was bright yellow. I didn't realize they were that rare.
    1
  2104. Well, Century's come a long way, haven't they? I remember when one of their hallmarks was the worst electropencil work on the market. :)
    1
  2105. The setup kinda reminds me of the street racing mission in Cyberpunk 2077. "Badges don't have a problem with this?" "Badges can't see anything over the pile of money in front of them."
    1
  2106. A family with that last name lived across the street from me when I was a kid. They pronounced it "bowlyer", but maybe don't go by them. :)
    1
  2107. The only significant difference is in whose name goes on the letterhead. In the USSR, where aircraft design bureaux were state institutions, it was the chief engineer. In the US, where they're mostly private corporations, it's whoever brought the bag full of money.
    1
  2108. Oh, so that's how those twin drum magazine things work. I used to wonder if maybe it had a rolled-up belt in one side, and the other side was for coiling up the empty belt so it didn't flop around. (It eventually occurred to me that the drums are too small to hold a usefully long belt that way, but then I still didn't know how the hell they really did work.)
    1
  2109. Is there a handgun with an oddly canted barrel? I can't think of one offhand, but I need a sidearm to go with the MAS-38 I don't have and the ZH-29 I also don't have. :)
    1
  2110.  @robertgellert1325  To be fair, pretty much every starship other than Enterprise that gets mentioned in the original series is seriously damaged, and most are destroyed (or, on a couple of occasions, left intact but with 100% crew fatalities). Serving in Starfleet will apparently be quite a dangerous job in the 2260s...
    1
  2111. "That's right: this ship hit the fan." That got the kind of laugh out of me that would have woken up my dog, back in the day.
    1
  2112. With the hood open, you can really tell that the new Viper doesn't have tires; they just painted a tire tread pattern on the wheels.
    1
  2113. When I was a little kid, my grandfather (who built his own furniture and whatnot) had a thing in his workshop called a Shopsmith, which was kind of a transforming woodworking machine that could be a table saw, or a lathe, or a drill press, or I don't even know what else. This seems like it's basically the machine gun version of that. :)
    1
  2114. Stupider-looking than the Tumbler? OK, that's... that's a position...
    1
  2115.  @koolkitties8552  That's like explaining how projectors work when you're reviewing a movie. Sometimes you have to assume your audience already understands the starting principles duh, as I believe the young people put it nowadays.
    1
  2116. The font change for the speak into the thing subtitle was just... (chef kiss)
    1
  2117. "That's rated F for Frust. Rated." /* FIXME: that gif of Cary Grant saying "Get out." goes here */
    1
  2118. "It's like the perfect amount, here's a bus license plate on a Mercedes C-class." Digression of the Month. :)
    1
  2119. I have to believe that Carroll Shelby wouldn't have been down with that color. Lime green is for those Mopar weirdos. :)
    1
  2120. What the hell is going on with that grille on the new one? I mean, the '90 was no prize in the styling department, it's about as interesting as a bucket of hollandaise sauce, but at least it looks like a car. Also: I love that Lexus themselves used the wrong word in the catalog listing for the cellphone. From context, they clearly wanted to say that the phone fits discreetly into the interior (i.e., without being too obvious, which is hilarious when applied to a 1990 center-console carphone). I mean, I guess technically it does also fit discretely ("composed of individual parts"), but that's obviously not what they meant.
    1
  2121. So if you put one of those Galilean sighting systems on a Galil... ... no... no, I'm not even going to try to finish that joke. I'm sorry, I'll wait in the car.
    1
  2122. Huh, wow. Primm is a real place. I always assumed they just made it up for Fallout: New Vegas.
    1
  2123.  @johnanon6938  Well, I didn't say I was disappointed not to find it. Just that I was expecting it. :)
    1
  2124. +Dave The Lamborghini's owner, obviously, not the wife. :)
    1
  2125. I had a college friend in the early 1990s whose hobby was buying '80s Audi 5000s, not because he was a collector, but because he hoped that eventually he would either find one that actually worked properly, or, failing that, amass enough junkers that he could finally assemble a working one. I don't think he ever managed it. One of them shed a wheel on the Interstate on the way back home from picking it up.
    1
  2126.  @TheProfessionalAmateur91  My point was that humans' relatively poor low-light vision shows that we evolved to function best during the day, hence the tendency for the night shift to screw up more often. :)
    1
  2127. I think I'd have ended up tipping that French cab driver more than he was mad about not making just for the entertainment value.
    1
  2128. ​ @skylined5534  Fast enough that rotating wood lots can be returned to relatively soon. True, it still takes years for any given lot to reach full growth again, but the point is that the total geographic area required for a given harvest level is both smaller than many people assume, and need not expand indefinitely.
    1
  2129. fore!
    1
  2130.  @Tounushi  - signed, anyone who has ever had to disassemble a Tokarev. :)
    1
  2131. Or Full Metal Jacket. "You're the kind of guy who would wow a guy up his act without the common gee-whiz courtesy of a reacharound."
    1
  2132. As someone with French Canadian ancestry, I'm pleased by the artist's attitude toward being repeatedly disciplined for defacing rifles. Merde donnée: aucune. :) I'm just surprised he didn't insist on taking it home with him after finding it in the museum. After all, he paid for it. :)
    1
  2133. Combat Carl's great-granddad was a Micro-Maxim gunner in the Big One. Not a lot of people know that!
    1
  2134. "I don't understand why everyone is so upset about salt rifles. Surely salt is less dangerous as a projectile than--what? Oh! Never mind."
    1
  2135. As a friend of mine in college used to say, "Some people, you know, they just will not do."
    1
  2136. In the little town in the woods where I live in the US, the local cell providers give less than one-tenth of one crap whether we think their tower is an eyesore. They just threw it up on a ridge, blatantly obvious from everywhere in town, and to hell with your forest views; just be grateful you have service, you bunch of hillbillies. That'll be a hundred bucks a month, and be quick about it.
    1
  2137. ♪ isn't it Ioniq
    1
  2138. "Vladof! You don't need to be a better shot; you just need to shoot MORE BULLETS."
    1
  2139. Springfield Armory was one of the competitors and did the testing, which is like taking a competitive exam and having your paper graded by one of your classmates. Neither the AR-10 nor the FAL ever really had a chance.
    1
  2140. The quip about making the stone easier to carry reminded me of the classic Saturday Night Live sketch making fun of the old Italian Hercules movies. "That boulder is too large. I could lift a smaller one."
    1
  2141. It really is a spectacularly silly weapons platform, even by Imperial standards. Even if walking mechs were practical in the first place, this design is way too tall and tippy to be viable. Looks good on film, though, and that's the most important thing. :)
    1
  2142. The Challenger disaster was caused by the solid rocket boosters, which were what used the chemical PEPCON ended up stockpiling. Both directly and indirectly, they were the most dangerous part of the Space Shuttle system... so of course NASA went ahead and re-used them for I Can't Believe It's Not Project Apollo. :/
    1
  2143. 14:30 You see our beautiful blue planet spinning... the wrong way. GG, Ford. You did it.
    1
  2144. I'm 80% sure they did a compact P5 later on that looked quite similar, but I might be imagining it.
    1
  2145. Hold on--can you even carry a Steyr-Hahn with a loaded magazine but not one in the chamber? It's stripper-loaded, as soon as the clip is pulled out it's going to pick up the first round and close...
    1
  2146.  @gandydancer9710  ... What makes no sense? Wanting the ship to be saved? Preferring sinking over scrapping, if it comes to it? Simon Winchester? Can't be Simon Winchester, he makes a lot of sense.
    1
  2147. Both the stance and the muzzle flash at 6:54 remind me of an old photo I once saw in a kids' book about the FBI (no, seriously, that was a thing), which showed 1920s agents training with Thompson guns. The only things it's missing are the snazzy suit and the tracer fire. (Are there tracer shotgun rounds? How would that even work?)
    1
  2148. Non-inverter microwave ovens control their power levels by duty-cycling the magnetron, too. I wonder if the ones from back when they had knobs instead of digital electronic controls used something similar to do that.
    1
  2149.  @alangordon3283  This is me, not arguing with some rando on the Internet.
    1
  2150. Well, that's nostalgic. I remember seeing these in my grandfather's stack of Shooter's Bible backissues when I was a kid (the same ones where I first saw gold-damascened Llamas) and thinking it would be super cool to have one. Never saw one in person, though.
    1
  2151.  @AKAtheA  True, there is that.
    1
  2152. Oh hey, I have that H.P. Lovecraft compilation. (For some weird reason, I love it when I spot a book I have on the shelf behind someone in a documentary, podcast, etc.)
    1
  2153.  @LankyAssMofka  Thermite was invented in the 1890s, but I don't know offhand whether it had been weaponized by World War I.
    1
  2154.  @broitsmikey  England is a silly place, early-twentieth-century England doubly so. :)
    1
  2155. I took a couple of semesters of German in college, and one day we talked about the spelling reform that got rid of ß. One of the slides showed a probably-unintended consequence of the change, which was that places formerly named things like "Weißstrasse" (White Street) became "Weissstrasse", which is, with the best will in the world, quite silly.
    1
  2156. The prominently painted name of the weapon on the side reminds me of how absolutely every prop on the 1960s Batman TV show was clearly labeled with what it was. SHARK REPELLANT BAT SPRAY. SURFING ABILITY AND EXPERIENCE TRANSFEROMETER. RAKETENPANZERBÜCHSE.
    1
  2157. Thanks to your explanation on this gun, I now finally understand why Browning MGs have to be racked twice to get them working.
    1
  2158. "American workplaces have changed beyond recognition over the course of the last century." Unfortunately, in an industrial context, they've done this largely by going away altogether. Meanwhile, in a lot of the places where jobs like the ones at Triangle have gone, they're the same as they ever were. :/
    1
  2159. As they used to say on SportsCenter, "Full extension!"
    1
  2160. "Sergeant Benton! Chap with the wings there, five rounds rapid."
    1
  2161. "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."
    1
  2162. When I saw the video title said the New Jersey, I thought you meant the Iranians were specifically overflying the Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial, possibly with the intent of investigating the operating support she receives from the New Jersey Department of State, and also a number of other businesses and private individuals. Relieved to learn this is not the case. Besides, they should just watch her YouTube channel.
    1
  2163. You know how, statistically, there has to be a least competent member of each profession? Well...
    1
  2164. So... it's basically the M1 equivalent of a 1932 Ford highboy. No fenders, no hood, no roof, mildly-hopped-up flathead V8, big wide rear wheels. I love it. :)
    1
  2165. I've never seen one in person, as far as I know, but I had heard of them. Handsome beasts. :)
    1
  2166. I mean, you say the revised iconography is more self-explanatory, but it could reasonably be interpreted to mean "this emits rays which will turn you into a pirate, after which you will run away to plunder things."
    1
  2167. 4. Axel Foley has one.
    1
  2168. As an aside, the technical term for "horse equipment" is "tack". :)
    1
  2169. In re mismatched guns deriving, if not value, at least interest from being mismatched, I have in my collection the most mismatched gun I know of. About two-thirds of it is a very early-postwar VKT Lahti L-35, and the rest is a Husqvarna m/40.
    1
  2170. California Highway Patrolman: Level with me, son. What are you on? Doug: I'm driving a Miura! That's it! That's enough!
    1
  2171.  @Foolishman1776  Same, but with a first-model Walther CCP, made before someone at Walther sat bolt upright in bed one morning thinking, "Mein Gott, we are Germans, surely we can do better than this." Legit patrolling the room looking for that plunger thing that goes in the back of the slide (and that after getting the dang thing jammed with the slide halfway off because the button wasn't pressed far enough). Completely ridiculous system for a gun made in the 21st century. And of course they fixed it right after I bought one. :)
    1
  2172. To be fair, Willis Lee couldn't be everywhere at once.
    1
  2173. I'm impressed by how non-lethal that was. Assuming you were operating in a safe way in the first place, i.e., the shooter was wearing eye protection and there was no one downrange to get clobbered by the barrel, everybody around would've gone home (after the shooter visited an ER to get that finger looked at, and probably a clothing store to get some new pants).
    1
  2174. Thanks, I hate it! (... the sound, not the video. The video's great. :)
    1
  2175. Except the fuel pumps. The fuel pumps were not bulletproof.
    1
  2176. (considers subheadline at 8:11) Karl Fuchs, eh? Klaus's lesser-known younger brother, presumably...
    1
  2177. That empty spare wheel space is there because, I kid you not, we have arrived at a place as a civilization where a spare tire is a ~$400 option on a car. One which the person who specced that $50,000+ GT balked at paying for, evidently, and rightly so. For that money you don't even get a real spare tire, it's one of those stupid shopping cart wheels.
    1
  2178.  @mpetersen6  Definitely seconded on Simon Winchester, one of my favorites. Shoutout to the late Edward Herrmann's performances of David McCullough's books (e.g., The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge et al.) as well.
    1
  2179. "I think the snood makes me look dashing, don't you think?"
    1
  2180. Animaniacs would have made that list of countries receiving Garands into a song. I think we all know that. :)
    1
  2181.  @shawnj3473  Asbestos was used in practically everything back in the day. It was the miracle material of the early 20th century, with virtually unlimited uses and no appreciable downsides. Just like radium paint! (that last part was sarcasm btw)
    1
  2182.  @craigmocello8552  [ citation needed ]
    1
  2183.  @KurosakiYukigo  Homemade torture device. Basically you take an extension cord, cut off the receptacle end, and apply the leads to bits of someone you don't like, then plug it in. Popular with the South American cocaine cartels of the 1980s, hence the name. (I'm not sure why "telephone", I guess just because it involved connecting wires to a wall?) Not to be confused with the Tucker Telephone, which was the use of an actual telephone as a torture device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_Telephone
    1
  2184.  @butwhataboutdragons7768  I have a Mk III* SMLE with a similarly dark stock, but I doubt the 17th-century Dutch used quite as much cosmoline as I suspect my Lee-Enfield spent much of the 20th century marinating in. :)
    1
  2185. Well, if they had to switch to a Soviet design, at least they went with VVERs. Imagine the vibe in the Czechoslovakian nuclear ministry circa 1986 if they'd replaced their local design with RBMKs in the '70s...
    1
  2186. "Good news: I may have a solution to my heating problem. Bad news: It involves me digging up the radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Now, if I remember my training correctly, one of the lessons was titled, 'Don't dig up the big box of plutonium, Mark.'"
    1
  2187. I know, right? It's even worse than trying to read the spines on the bookshelf.
    1
  2188. Oh God, I had forgotten about the PT Cruiser convertible.
    1
  2189. I'm not sure I would be 100 percent comfortable with a weapon that a) fires HE ammunition and b) jostles said ammuntion so violently that the as-yet-unfired rounds can damage the magazine. Maybe that's just me.
    1
  2190. That rollers-that-don't-roll-for-extra-precision thing came from the same place in the German soul as the adjustable shutoff delay time for the rear number plate light in S-class Mercedes-Benzes.
    1
  2191. One of the best visual gags on television, which would absolutely not work now, is Frank Drebin's jacket on Police Squad! It was patterned to look like herringbone tweed interacting destructively with NTSC encoding. If you looked closely, you could tell it wasn't, because it wrinkled and the pattern on the sleeves moved with his arms, but when he held still it looked exactly like the real(?) thing.
    1
  2192. I have a Mitchell Arms American Eagle 08. Those Luger malfunctions were all... very familiar to me.
    1
  2193. Basing blasters on antiquated firearms is a long and honorable Star Wars tradition, but even so, I was not expecting an 1873 trapdoor Springfield blaster. That seems like taking the concept slightly too far. I guess the next logical step would be an 1851 Colt Navy blaster. :)
    1
  2194. Postulated: The light bulb cartel conspiracy theory grew up, went to conspiracy college, and became the one about how the Medical Establishment could cure (insert terminal illness) easily, but chooses not to because it makes more money from palliative care.
    1
  2195. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." —Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988), in his conclusion to Appendix F of the Rogers Commission report on the loss of space shuttle Challenger, 1986
    1
  2196. The weird thing about the new scale is that based on the HBO meme, we know Chernobyl was level 1.
    1
  2197. "sold for $12,500"
    1
  2198. Daaamn, it does. I knew it looked familiar and could not figure out why.
    1
  2199. "read the room" has never been one of Google AdSense's core competencies.
    1
  2200. The Hyundai... Horse. Sure! Why not? That's not even the worst horse-related name to come out of the Far East (that would be the Mitsubishi Starion, which Mitsubishi later claimed was a contraction of "Star of Arion" after people pointed out that that's not how you spell "stallion" in English).
    1
  2201. Oh no, this is the end of the playlist. Now what am I going to do with the rest of the month?
    1
  2202. I love that the camera can't decide what color this car even is. It's different from every angle. Sometimes it's red. Sometimes it's orange. Occasionally it's pink. Nowadays, that would be sold as a feature, chameleon paint or some such nonsense, but in a '90s Lamborghini it's probably just because of a dodgy batch of paint. :)
    1
  2203. Is... is that an ironing board?
    1
  2204. "Each NSX is individually numbered." Um... all cars are individually numbered, Doug. The NSX just has a supplementary one that's easier to interpret. :)
    1
  2205. This makes me think of that one Heinlein novel where world peace is enforced by a transnational agency with nukes in orbit, whose remit is to obliterate anybody who gets out of line, no exceptions, no appeals.
    1
  2206. I live in the town where the hardiest and/or craziest of these hikers end up, come September. I am... not inspired to follow Mr. Regular's example and start picking them up. :)
    1
  2207. I wonder whether the film/tape split in BBC productions (MPFC, original-formula Doctor Who, et al) was less noticeable at the time of original broadcast, since UK TV broadcasts were at 25 FPS, only one off from the usual frame rate of film. The difference is pretty noticeable in 30-FPS NTCS transfers of vintage Doctor Who episodes, and I would assume is startlingly obvious in any HD remasters of same. I mean, you'd still have that hard-to-quantify difference in "feel" between the two, but the frame rate disparity in the original sources would be better hidden. Also, in re the post-production having to be re-done for an effects-heavy show whose live-action photography was on film: this was recently done to the 1990s HBO series From the Earth to the Moon, which was reissued on Blu-ray to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 last year. (The necessity for it is also the reason why there probably won't be a Blu-ray release of the Director's Edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, since they spent a huge amount of money to re-make a bunch of the effects shots in that film... for DVD, only a couple years before HD formats came along. D'oh!)
    1
  2208. So we're up to, what... the Chip-o-Matic 8000 now? :)
    1
  2209. Not a terrible idea, really. Addresses that chronic "missed the drive-thru by a bit, backed up to it, forgot, backed over the car behind when trying to leave" thing old folks do sometimes.
    1
  2210. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that the several-thousand-year time difference has more to do with it than where they are.
    1
  2211. Is it weird that my favorite feature of this car is the cartoon in the owner's manual where Buster shows you how to get out? Doubly so because the manual is carried in one of the luggage compartments, so you can't consult it if you're inside and want to know how to get out. (Also, I like that with all the bespoke froofery the F1 has about it, the flashlight it comes with is a regular ol' two-AA-cell Mag Lite. I guess that was one wheel they decided not to reinvent. :)
    1
  2212. I always have some variant of this thought when I see people meow at cats, bark at dogs, etc. :)
    1
  2213. Dust explosions are no joke. The paper mill where my father worked for his entire career fought a constant battle against dust build-up in places where you wouldn't expect it, and as one of the plant engineers, he was always involved. One summer the company sent him to an offsite training couse on boiler and hazmat safety, and among the photos of blown-up factories and whatnot in the course materials were some truly arresting shots of what was left of an exploded flour mill.
    1
  2214. Oh hey, I just re-watched the old video on this a little while ago and thought, "Hmm, this could stand an update. I wonder if he still has that gun."
    1
  2215. The framing of that opening shot reminded me of something, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was for a few minutes. Then it dawned on me. "Some people say the best launch control system is one you never have to use. I respectfully disagree! I believe the best launch control system is one you only have to use once."
    1
  2216. The moment when Ian almost said "lever-action revolvers" gave me the most glorious mental image.
    1
  2217.  @greghardy9476  Nice.
    1
  2218. The coffee guy doesn't need coffee, he needs a beating. Clearly didn't get enough of them in grade school.
    1
  2219.  @MrInternFTL  I suppose. FTR, though, I meant from the other kids, not his parents.
    1
  2220. (cue the comments arguments about whether it's a real Superbird... again)
    1
  2221. Not necessarily; it's required by law on NFA firearms (this particular one is a short-barreled rifle). OTOH, that means someone actually dropped $200 to paper this beast.
    1
  2222. Yeah, one of the downsides of living out in the sticks where I do is that you can never have anything interesting, because you can never get it fixed.
    1
  2223. If you can't be bothered to come up with a username or learn the your/you're distinction then you shouldn't even be browsing the web, let alone commenting on it.
    1
  2224. Someone in the town where I live used to have a Scion xB with the badges from one of these on it.
    1
  2225.  @toweri_li  That said, it makes some sense for the two colors used to be far apart on the visible spectrum, so red and blue were probably not entirely arbitrary choices.
    1
  2226. Laudanum.
    1
  2227. The thing about soldiers not wearing hearing protection reminded me of that bit in Black Hawk Down where the SAW gunner keeps deafening his buddy, who is really not happy with him. Black Hawk Down is not a funny movie, obviously, but that scene is gold. Scuba diving in the desert?
    1
  2228. Well, I mean, they probably did...
    1
  2229. Ye gods. So many unnecessary servos. So few proper controls. So little futureproofing. And that seems to be the way of it across the industry now. Try as I might, I just can't envision any of these cars (these, Teslas, that spaceshippy BMW thing, etc.) as 10-to-15-year-old used cars on their third or fourth owners, with any of that stuff still working. The future looks increasingly bleak for anyone who can't afford to buy new. (Also, check out how dusty that center screen is--in the press car! Oof.)
    1
  2230. I was in an unfamiliar town for a conference a few years ago, walking back to my motel from the venue, when a pair of enormous pit bulls came out of a doorway up ahead of me at the end of one of those Y-shaped double leashes. They spotted me and immediately raced over, tongues flapping, eyes rolling, dragging a very flustered young woman behind them, to... sniff my jacket pockets for treats. Unfortunately, I didn't have any, so they ate my arms. Just kidding, they were the friendliest dogs I've ever seen in my life. Their owner was mortified at the way they slobbered on my pants and jostled me around, competing for scritchy time. She kept trying to apologize. Like, for what? It was the most fun I'd had all week. :) Edit: forgot to note, they were really pretty, too. One had brown-blue heterochromia and they were both that shimmery silver color, like Weimaraners.
    1
  2231. As soon as you lifted up that Smith-Corona manual, I could smell it. I spent a fair bit of my childhood and early adolescence, before we got a computer sophisticated enough to run a word processor, banging out Grodd only knows what nonsense on a typewriter very like that one, which had been my mother's when she was in college.
    1
  2232. It kind of is a relic of the '60s, given that it's a license-built copy of the Fiat 127 (designed in the late '60s, started production in 1971). Eastern Bloc car manufacturing was like that: they'd get hold of the tooling and designs for an outdated Western (usually Italian) car and just keep making it for years, if not decades. Why not? It's not as if the factory management had to give one-tenth of one damn about consumer wishes. If you wanted a car in Yugoslavia in the '80s, and you somehow had both the permission and the resources to buy one, you got one of these or you... didn't get a car.
    1
  2233. Hey, I had an '84 Oldsmobile Toronado that had those fender-mounted turn signal indicators on it. That car was not quite as ridiculous as a '77 Eldorado--American luxobarges had gotten a bit smaller by 1984--but it was still pretty hilarious. For instance, it had velvet seats. Not just cloth; velvet. I kid you not. It also had a speedometer that only went to 85 mph, which was, I can assure you, considerably less than the car's actual top speed, even though Oldsmobile somehow found a way to extract only 170 horsepower from a 350-cubic-inch V8. Ah, the 1980s. Oh yeah, also, if anyone's curious: the lamps on the C-pillars of these and other '70s/early-'80s luxury cars are called opera lamps (not to be confused with opera lights, which are the little windows next to them). They're a callback to the similarly placed windows and lanterns on the sides of the fancier sorts of horse-drawn coaches. (In a similar vein, that style of half-vinyl roof is called a landau roof because it references the folding tops on landau coaches.) My Toronado had those, too.
    1
  2234. The headlights do that because it's a "motorcycle". In most (if not all?) states, motorcycles are required to have their headlights on at all times, so they might as well be hardwired. (Also, it seems very likely that the speedometer face goes to 220 because the same gauge can be set to read either in MPH or km/hr. Note that everything above 120 is in smaller print; they knew that part of the range wasn't going to get used much.)
    1
  2235. I can't remember dachshunds being an available enrichment item for lions in Planet Zoo, but here we are. (If any dog was ever going to do this, to be fair, it would have to be a dachshund. Little maniacs know no fear. :)
    1
  2236. 0:11 (Bob Newhart-style hesitant interjection) They're... they're vertical.
    1
  2237. I can think of one way a design like this could come about: A crack commando unit has been locked in a sheet metal shop by a gang of vicious criminals. They have a Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless and seven rounds of .32 ACP ammunition, but the pistol's frame is broken and the shop they're in doesn't have the right tools to repair it. Cue the music. https://youtu.be/_MVonyVSQoM?t=23s
    1
  2238. If they were really serious about saving weight, they wouldn't have painted it.
    1
  2239. Involuntary-bark-of-laughter moment: "What a weeeird metric."
    1
  2240.  @theduke7539  Hood ornaments hung on a bit longer than that, particularly on full-size American cars; over the years, I've had at least three such cars from the 1980s that had them (an '84 Toronado, an '87 Grand Prix, and an '89 Crown Vic).
    1
  2241. My 2013 Beetle Turbo has a lap timer, I guess because after they put in the oil temp and boost/vac gauges, VW thought it needed a third one and couldn't think what else to put there. It is the most ridiculous thing on what is, let's be honest, a fairly silly car, and it always makes me think of Jeremy Clarkson talking about the (nearly identical) bonus gauge package on the Porsche 911: "What a thing that is! What a tool... you'll look." :)
    1
  2242. Wait, doesn't everyone do this?
    1
  2243. That interior is making me hungry for butterscotch pudding. Also: "It's not really all that bad this time" is the best praise I've ever seen one of these wanky center console systems receive. :)
    1
  2244. That's... not a bench seat. That's three bucket seats in a row, one of which is narrow and has no legroom.
    1
  2245. 14:10 "Nah, I'm good. I got sauce in the tank."
    1
  2246. Today I learned that there is such a thing as the Barrow-in-Furness Dockland Museum, which I now feel a strange desire to see immediately.
    1
  2247. Out of everything that happens in this video, it was "Orbeez!" <SCHROCK> that made me laugh until tears came to my eyes.
    1
  2248. The knurl on the suppressor makes it look uncannily like a prop department built it out of a 4×D-cell Mag-Lite. I can't un-see it...
    1
  2249. Conversely, the other tragedy of the human condition is that none of the rest of these clownshoes we have to deal with on the regular understand that they're speaking to the main character. :)
    1
  2250. It rends my soul on a level younger people won't understand for decades to see the phrase "old classic car from the early 1980s." (My first car was a 1984 Oldsmobile. :)
    1
  2251. Chauchat LMGs were also made by a bicycle factory, which you can kind of tell when you notice the gauge of steel tubing most of a Chauchat is made from. :)
    1
  2252. I have to admit, I'd have been tempted to go get it and park it outside the owner's workplace, so it was sitting there waiting when he came out after his shift. Especially if there was somewhere nearby where I could watch his reaction. :)
    1
  2253. It'll be especially funny if that tiny kitten grows up to be a humongous cat. :)
    1
  2254. At around the same time, I worked for a computer company called Leading Edge Products. Same kind of deal, except our welds were better. :)
    1
  2255. "Thank you for being good." "I have not yet begun to fight."
    1
  2256. I have no joke, I just like saying "ballistic missile galleon".
    1
  2257. I think I'm going to have to give the "craziest styling ever" award to the TVR Sagaris, which Jeremy Clarkson once said looked like it had been styled by an axe murderer, but the W8 is up there.
    1
  2258. Yeah, I can see why this didn't fly as a military weapon. Much like the AN-94, I have my doubts that all that internal gubbins is even remotely whatever the Russian equivalent of "GI-resistant" is. :)
    1
  2259.  @michaelpiatkowskijr1045  Nagumo. Nagato was a ship and, as such, did not have a tactical opinion. :)
    1
  2260. Is it just me, or is Ed's audio slightly out of sync?
    1
  2261. "Way slower than you want" is the industry standard, so it's probably safe to assume.
    1
  2262. Hmm. Maybe I'm squeamish, but I don't think I want the stuff that happens in a shotgun breech happening right next to my face and neck.
    1
  2263. The .50 BMG didn't just blow the lining of the mask through the zombie's head, it ejected his entire skull from his head with the brain still in it. That's absolutely horrifying.
    1
  2264. Technically, the front of any ship can be knocked off. It all depends on what you hit.
    1
  2265. I had one of those as a teenager (late '80s, and it was old then; I found it at a yard sale). It was great at stopping me from having epic nosebleeds at night in the winter, but it also programmed my developing brain so that even now, 35 years later, I have a hard time sleeping if there isn't a fan running somewhere in the room. :) I'll take that over the nosebleeds, though.
    1
  2266. Wow. It really is a wonderful toy.
    1
  2267. I saw one of those giant tin roosters in my local Tractor Supply the other day. Briefly considered picking it up to dress up my front yard a little, but I was worried that some Kentuckian maniac might show up and assault it.
    1
  2268. I seem to recall that the clutch on the manual version is godawful stiff. Transmission itself is pretty decent, but you could hurt yourself trying to work that clutch in traffic.
    1
  2269. This unnameable technology also has great potential for making replacement clips for Remington Model 8 rifles, which are not as expensive when you do find one, but are almost as hard to find.
    1
  2270.  @droolingidiot  Nice!
    1
  2271. To be fair, no one in an American cemetery has been there for 2,600 years.
    1
  2272. I expect Ian's a bit wary of appearing to call people out since the whole "defective pistols" kerfuffle a little while back.
    1
  2273.  MF Nickster  Heh, my local police department got a Camaro at around the same time, and there was a brief uproar until the chief released a statement explaining that they hadn't paid for it, but rather stolen "forfeited" it from some minor criminal or another.
    1
  2274. John: "... as the company behind the disaster, The Heart of Texas, was a one-man operation." My brain, automatically: "I guess 'shift change' won't be a factor this time, then."
    1
  2275. Hat tip to that one poor jerk in a B-52 crew who doesn't even get an ejection seat, but instead is expected to bail out WWII-style through the hole left behind by one of his luckier crewmates. (This is really a thing.)
    1
  2276. Henry Ford was never a good corporate overlord to have. The annals of his career are rife with mistreatment of dealers, suppliers, employees, his own son, the entire country of Brazil, and pretty much everybody else within reach.
    1
  2277. FSVO "progress"...
    1
  2278.  @Simon_Nonymous  Hey, now. Von Braun came willingly, It was us or the Soviets, after all.
    1
  2279. You were following in a time-honored tradition of the automotive industry! In the 1920s, to promote the new antiknock wonder additive tetraethyl lead, chemist Thomas Midgley Jr. used to put on public demonstrations where he'd wash his hands in TEL to show how safe it was. After a while he stopped doing those and disappeared from public view for a while; his employers told people who asked that he was on vacation. Which he was! To recover from lead poisoning. Once he was finished with TEL, Midgley went on to invent chlorofluorocarbons. I'm not making this up. (To be fair, unlike with lead, he was honestly unaware that CFCs were dangerous, and in fact had invented them specifically to replace much more directly harmful refrigerants. That whole "ozone destroying" thing wasn't discovered until decades after Midgley's death. Which was caused by another of his inventions, but that's a different story.)
    1
  2280.  @TheLongDon  Karl, you're dead and your ideology demonstrably failed, so I'm really not sure you're in a position to throw stones.
    1
  2281. As the late Robin Williams once put it, "Vell, ve had a few beers, next sing you know, zere ve are in Czechoslovakia."
    1
  2282. Hey, Ian, speaking of weird shotguns, have you seen https://youtu.be/P3Z_vhoNBIo ? The thing Mark's working on in that one seems right up your street. Reminds me a little of that aluminum one ArmaLite did, only even weirder.
    1
  2283. Hmm. There's a logging tool called a peavey (variation on a cant dog), invented by one Joseph Peavey in mid-19th-century Maine and later refined by his grandson James. The Peavey company still exists today. I wonder if there's a connection.
    1
  2284. Also, they were very expensive.
    1
  2285. On a point of order, the people who think they're cool aren't wrong, that's just not the same thing as their being any good. :)
    1
  2286. "THIS is a 1954 Herkimer Battle Jitney..."
    1
  2287.  @smorrow  "Arena" (season 1, episode 18).
    1
  2288.  @korbetthein3072  People did know what metallic cartridges were at the time, they were just still too hard to produce in quantity to be cheap enough for widespread adoption. It should've been obvious to anyone who was paying attention that, once practical mass-production techniques were developed and the costs came down, the system had so many practical advantages that it would take over.
    1
  2289. Things I would not want to be doing anywhere near that knife blade: operating a ramrod.
    1
  2290. I'm deeply tickled by that one officer at 27:52 who was clearly not expecting the elevator to start moving when it did. :)
    1
  2291. When you THIS so hard you're out of breath at the end, that's a sign. Of what, I'm not entirely sure. :)
    1
  2292. This "made in Texas by Americans" thing is confusing. I don't think I've ever seen a Texan willingly identify himself as a mere "American" before, let alone sound like he's proud of it. It'd be like a naval aviator calling himself a "pilot". ;)
    1
  2293. The peanut butter/ketchup things reminds me of one of my father's uncles. He was with the Marines on Guadalcanal, and for the rest of his life he cherished a violent hatred of three things: the Japanese, bananas, and SPAM.
    1
  2294.  @Gail1Marie  That would depend on what was wrong with the airplane...
    1
  2295. Good old Steyr-Hahn. It's got a grip that feels like it was designed for people with right-angle clamps for hands, like life-size Lego minifigures, but I love it anyway. :)
    1
  2296. "The cold steel! They don't like it up 'em. They do not like it up 'em. "
    1
  2297.  @KrotowX  He wasn't unattended, the entire flight crew was right there with him (including the first officer, still in his own seat at his own controls). And they still fucked it up and everyone died.
    1
  2298. Someone somewhere has tried to mount a Zip™ 22™ on that accessory rail, in an attempt to become a Less Lethal™ Zip™ Operator™. This attempt has failed, since the Taser shotgun rounds are already more lethal than a Zip™ 22™.
    1
  2299. Another in the long lines of guns with pistol grips that look like they were designed to be held by life-size Lego minifigures. (Especially the brown one.)
    1
  2300. Zeus looks uncannily like my mother's late cat Tracy, who was one of a pair (his brother's name was Spencer, and if you get that joke, you may be as old as my mother :). Tracy was notable for his timidity, his outstanding clumsiness, and his forgiving nature, none of which traits Spencer shared to any detectable degree.
    1
  2301. At the risk of starting a Mac-vs-PC-style holy war, I have a similar sentimental attachment to the classic Craftsman screwdrivers with the clear acetate handles (red stripes for flathead, blue collar for Philips). Pretty much the same reason Adam loves the Stanleys--they're what we had when I was a kid, and they consequently feel more at home in my hand than any other design.
    1
  2302. Land mines. Sure! That's just what the Zone needed. Good work, guys.
    1
  2303. Upon rewatch: Ian's slightly sheepish remark that he already had videos about what he was considering as his next book topic brought up a mental picture of the cover of Bergmann to Bergmann: Bergmann Automatic Pistols 1893-1921 - and it is glorious.
    1
  2304. Oh look, it's our old friend AECL. Although I suppose you can't really hang this one on them.
    1
  2305. Weirdly, one that he doesn't have and I do. I wouldn't have thought that Venn diagram would have any overlap at all, but there it is. (I've got a weird one, too, it's half VKT Lahti and half Swedish m/40. Which I assume means it hates its own guts and snarks at itself on the Internet in its spare time. :)
    1
  2306. Also: I'm pretty sure the emergency exit window is in case the van rolls and ends up lying on the side with the door; that's why it's on the opposite side. Not that you'd really be in any shape to use it after getting bounced off the minibar and the speakers a few times during the rollover, but it's probably required.
    1
  2307. The Ithaca Auto & Burglar, named after the two things you're intended to shoot with it. ... Wait, no.
    1
  2308. "That's... actually quite a lot of blood!"
    1
  2309. I bet Twinkies were up there. All that spongy cake, all that hidden surface area...
    1
  2310. Around where I live, we don't have 5G towers yet, so the thing people have latched onto to get paranoid about instead is the "smart meters" the electric utility has been going around putting on subscribers' houses. These have an RF transmitter of some kind in them that the meter readers can ping from a distance so they don't have to get out of their vehicles to check them, enormously simplifying their working day, and for a while there I was getting about a leaflet a week in my mailbox from some Concerned Citizens' Organization that was absolutely convinced these things were going to give everyone cancer within a month (while controlling our minds on behalf of the Deep State, naturally).
    1
  2311.  @glennk2973  Not that kind of smart meter. The type I'm talking about is still the usual thing on the outside of the house, it just reports its findings to the meter readers by RF so they don't have to physically enter the yard and walk up to the house to read it.
    1
  2312. In the mid-'90s, I worked for a subsidiary of another Daewoo division, Daewoo Telecom. They made PC clones in the "3.6 röntgen" quality range. Having been one of their tech support guys and spent some time in the warranty repair shop, I had a front-row seat for everything they did wrong, and brother, those scars run deep. It's nice to see there were other branches of that gargantuan company that could build nice things. :)
    1
  2313.  @PlainlyDifficult  "My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four... unless there are three other people." - Orson Welles, F for Fake (1973)
    1
  2314. They're not hard to find. I've got an old-timey one that spent some time in South Korea after the war and wasn't very expensive, and there are a few companies making new ones that are slightly different mechanically, but look the part. Can't speak for how well any of the modern repros work, though, as I've never handled one in person.
    1
  2315. I have a feeling there's a navigation officer who's about to be unemployed in Greenland.
    1
  2316. I assume cars with front trunks have that second latch for the same reason front-engine cars' hoods have it: to provide an extra margin of safety against the thing flying open and cutting off all forward visibility if the main latch fails at speed.
    1
  2317. The main thing I remember about the Viper from when they first came out was how utterly terrifying it was to drive in the original Gran Turismo. It was just, like, "Do you want to die? Immediately? VIPER." (OK, you can't die in Gran Turismo, you can't even damage the car, but you know what I mean.)
    1
  2318. It looks like a saddle ring, which isn't quite the same thing, although I don't know why there would be one on a Navy carbine.
    1
  2319. And then there was Lokomotiv Yaroslavl. Three guys at the controls, none of them qualified on the aircraft, all of them trying to do different things during takeoff, every one of which was wrong, mistimed, or both.
    1
  2320.  @MultiSciGeek  There's an episode of Mayday (aka Air Crash Investigation in some markets) on the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl crash.
    1
  2321. It reminds me less of a slot machine than an early-'80s arcade game, or possibly the really spicy phase of a c-spine MRI, but hey, I don't make the rules. :)
    1
  2322. Well, except a GMC. A GMC is very like a Chevrolet. :)
    1
  2323. You took your partner apart and couldn't figure out how to put them back together?
    1
  2324.  @andrewweitzman4006  Oh, nice. I used to have occasion sometimes to drive up the St. John valley on US-1, from Van Buren up to Madawaska, and it was always fun to look across the river and see how every single little town on the NB side has its own massive church. I mean, we have churches on the Maine side too, but... we don't do 'em like the Acadians did 'em. :)
    1
  2325. I'm surprised they don't have tangent rear sights that go out to, say, 1200 meters. Fifteen hundred for the 7mm version. :)
    1
  2326. If I had one of these, the temptation would always be there to just go into a trance watching the action work. "Elevator goes up... elevator goes down. Elevator goes up... elevator goes down. Elevator goes up..." (any other Bad Obsession Motorsport fans about? :)
    1
  2327. Favorite 1911, eh? Well, I have to confess that as a shooter I don't really get along with them all that well. Something about them just doesn't line up very well with my hands. As a historian, though, I'm fond of the World War II-era GI A1s that were made by unusual contractors, like Singer Manufacturing and Union Switch & Signal.
    1
  2328. I wonder if those weird fake seats are because Maserati offered rear seats in some markets and not others. I had a Honda CR-Z that was like that. The US model like I had just had these weird plastic tubs and a hard folding bulkhead back there, but the ones sold in Japan had (presumably useless) 2+2 rear seating.
    1
  2329. So... how do you get the "Emotion Control Unit" out of that slot when you're done having your emotions controlled? Is it like a pushbutton on an old-timey hi-fi receiver? Push it again and it pops out when you let go? Also, it's neat that you can see the exploding roll bars when the tonneau is open for deployment/retraction of the roof.
    1
  2330. I suspect it says "power point" because at that time, a lot of older people would still have been expecting a cigarette lighter in that particular socket. The label lets them know it's meant to be missing.
    1
  2331. If the .30-caliber version was the Box Cannon, this must be the Super Box Cannon.
    1
  2332. I remember when this car was on Top Gear. IIRC, Brian Johnson from AC/DC didn't know what to make of it, but James May quite enjoyed Johnson's 1920s Bentley while he was trying to figure it out. ;)
    1
  2333. TVR button placement is the kind of thing you get when your engineers work in a factory that is constantly full of fiberglass resin fumes.
    1
  2334. Charlie is, as I believe the young people say, a whole mood. "Hi! How you feeling?" "Don't you 'how you feeling' me, young lady."
    1
  2335. My mother had an English springer spaniel named Ziggy. He, too, cultivated a profound and measured emptiness of head. Nominative determinism?
    1
  2336. This kind of topic always makes me think of Matt Craven as Grumman engineer Tom Kelly, the lead engineer on the LEM program, in From the Earth to the Moon. There's a great scene where one of the junior engineers comes to his office late one night and says he's just re-run some calculations and figured out that a major setback they just had is his fault, fully expecting to be fired on the spot. Kelly tells him to go home and get some rest, then come back tomorrow and fix the problem. "You did a good thing. Not this! This is bad. But you owned up to it."
    1
  2337.  @inconnu4961  For reasons known only to themselves, they tend to stay away from Interstate 95. :)
    1
  2338. A clock with a three-millimeter dial?! How do you even read it?
    1
  2339. I mean, I too have crashed a train into a track maintenance vehicle, but I was eight and operating a Lionel layout at the time, so my sense of solidarity with the at-fault managers is... limited.
    1
  2340. That single meow during the rinse cycle. "You know, I really am quite miserable."
    1
  2341. Now I'm picturing an SVX and a '90s Saab getting into an argument about whether the BRIGHT button or the NIGHT PANEL button is the better idea. Also, I love those early airbag steering wheels, where they hadn't yet figured out how to have the horn control in the middle where you'd normally expect it to be.
    1
  2342. C'mon, you can't make a quip like that without the "Heyooooo" at the end.
    1
  2343. You used to be able to get the Suburban with rear doors like that, a million years ago, when it was one of like four SUVs on the market and the term didn't even exist yet. Was a fairly sought-after feature at the time, although to be fair, those had ginormous side mirrors and tended to be driven by the kind of people who didn't care if they backed over lesser cars and whatnot anyway. That interior brings back memories. I had a neo-Mini for a while. It was huge fun to drive, but I didn't get to do that very much because it broke down all the time. My "favorite" of its many failure states was when the drains for the sunroof stopped working, so that instead of directing the water out the bottom of the car, they channeled it all into the electrical box in the driver's footwell. Because naturally you would design a weather drain system so that something like that could happen, wouldn't you?
    1
  2344.  @Moonhermit-  So... some mobbed-up dude is hiring shadowrunners to heist weapons museums. I mean, that's terrible? But at the same time, I'm not gonna lie, it's pretty baller.
    1
  2345. "An ethically questionable chapter in the discipline of psychology," he says, implying there's some other kind.
    1
  2346. I wonder if the Lumière brothers believed in nominative determinism.
    1
  2347. Oof. Oof, I say.
    1
  2348. This reminds me of nothing so much as the films on Top Gear where they would attempt to build, say, a hovercraft, or an amphibious car, except those were intended to be fiascos for entertainment purposes. You can see the CEO of Pylon announcing the contract to his colleagues, having it pointed out to him that they had never made a rifle or anything like one, and replying, "How hard can it be?"
    1
  2349. In fairness to the Tahoe Hybrid, it was never meant to be any good. It's exactly what GM intended it to be: a cynical cash-in on the hype (and the tax credits) of the early hybrid era. Of course, the fact that a vehicle was supposed to be junk doesn't mitigate the fact that it is junk, but at least there's a reason. As far as the Isetta goes, I hope one of these days you get an opportunity to drive one of the various types of Messerschmitt Kabinenroller. Same concept, better styling, plus you're driving a Messerschmitt, which I have to assume is inherently awesome.
    1
  2350. Alas, Harry Truman was not from the State of Enterprise, so that wasn't going to happen.
    1
  2351. I mean... it's not quite as silly as the notorious MacAdam Shield Shovel, but it's close. :)
    1
  2352. Asking a channel called Forgotten Weapons to cover your brand new product does seem a little like tempting fate, doesn't it?
    1
  2353. Well, you sell enough aftermarket kits, you start thinking, "Hell, maybe we should just ship them with these things."
    1
  2354. Oh hey, it's the debut of the Easy-Bake Oven.
    1
  2355. Alden Towler I thought that floor looked familiar. ... What?
    1
  2356. My favorite thing about this video is the background sounds: (crickets crickets crickets) BOOM (... silence...) Those crickets hang out at a shooting range, they thought they were used to this kind of thing. They weren't expecting Colonel Boys. :)
    1
  2357. I'm not sure about the legacy scale, but on the "how did you f--k this up?!" scale, it's hard to beat Bill Bryson's comparison of this blunder to a person forgetting to take off their shoes before getting into the bathtub.
    1
  2358. Ha! I saw the magazine safety joke coming, and it was still worth it. :)
    1
  2359. The warning light cluster looks like the bit that should blink when the car is talking.
    1
  2360. I had an M2 carbine magazine (genuine GI surplus, even, nothing as crackpot as this thing) do this one time, at a commercial indoor range. That was embarrassing. The range master had to make everyone clear and stand by the wall while he went out into the death zone to retrieve my magazine follower for me. He was nice about it, though. Even picked up the seven unfired rounds it vomited onto the floor at the same time. Also, I love the casual "We can use this RPK!" Just like on a cooking show. Here's one I've prepared earlier. :)
    1
  2361. That SMLE at 51:00 is in gorgeous condition. My Mk III* spent so much of its life in cosmoline, the stock is virtually black and will never not be slightly sticky. :)
    1
  2362. The 19th-century British? Use an absurdly convoluted system of measurement that makes no sense to anyone else on the planet? Surely you jest, sir.
    1
  2363.  @rgemail  I don't think I would dismiss assertions that mass grave sites shouldn't be looted as "naysayers screaming sacrilege", but go off, I guess.
    1
  2364.  @rgemail  So what you're saying is, you understand nothing about the culture of seafaring. Got it.
    1
  2365. I suspect the "whatever reason" Jag went with a 5-speed was that they had about £20 in assorted loose change to spare when they developed this car. Same reason all those switches and stalks and such are from other, much less expensive cars...
    1
  2366. So if you had one of those French pistols, some .32 ACP, and a suppressor, you basically have a Welrod. :)
    1
  2367. I was eight when this happened, and I remember reading about it some time later in the "Drama in Real Life" feature of Reader's Digest (my grandmother subscribed). It made me permanently paranoid about standing under similar structures (walkways, atrium balconies, that kind of thing).
    1
  2368. I love that they painted the inside of the side plate.
    1
  2369. Was it one of the ones with the ribbon cartridge that goes in the side of the machine? I've got one of those kicking around here somewhere. Used to be my grandmother's. I think Smith-Corona electrics were usually set up to type in Elite, which is a slightly dressier fixed-pitch font than Courier.
    1
  2370. My house had a glass-top range when I moved in. It worked fine, but there were disadvantages. On the one I had, which had a white top as opposed to the more modern black ones, there wasn't much visual distinction between burners that were on and burners that were not. The top being completely flat also made it harder to keep a wok ring located. It also took forever to cool. When that range finally failed beyond repair, I replaced it with one that runs on propane (we don't have natural gas where I live). I'd rather have one with gas burners but an electric oven, but those are stupidly expensive.
    1
  2371. I love that someone decided to stamp the serial number where it says "Patent No." on the cylinder. Nice to know that not everyone was paying attention at work in the 1850s, either. :)
    1
  2372. And the Type 94 is Unfairly Disliked Cousin Nambu.
    1
  2373. Is it so track-focused that McLaren will void the warranty of anybody who tracks one? I seem to recall that's a thing they like to do.
    1
  2374. Oh hey, I learned to drive stick in a temperamental Dodge too! Of course, it was a 1980 Power Wagon, so the experience was not entirely the same. :)
    1
  2375. Instead of "not great, not terrible," the British equivalent of Dyatlov would simply shrug and say it's "not ideal."
    1
  2376. We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the AC began to take hold.
    1
  2377. (pictures the opening scene from The Italian Job, except instead of a Miura the guy's driving a hopped-up Fiat Panda)
    1
  2378.  @shawnr771  You don't have to show iD and do background checks to buy groceries yet.
    1
  2379.  @iLLeag7e  Couldn't afford it, alas.
    1
  2380. It messes with my head that these cars have existed long enough for one to be a barn find. How dare time pass like that? Doesn't it know who I am?!
    1
  2381. (reads the subthread about whether Fiats are any good) Ah, the Internet. If there's a hill, there'll be somebody out here willing to die on it.
    1
  2382.  @kaisersoymilk6912  Hey, it's not a fight I have a dog in. I've just always thought it's funny when people online adopt such vehement positions on both sides of arguments that are utterly meaningless. Goes right back to the salad days of Usenet.
    1
  2383.  @edkwon  Well, that and the fact that most of the model effects footage was provided so late in production that there wasn't really time to edit it properly. :)
    1
  2384. I was gonna say, the cultural rundown didn't include the fact that M200 is one of the cutest T-dolls. :)
    1
  2385. The "everyone is going to notice" bit reminds me of the practice range scene in RoboCop, where everyone sort of gradually realizes that somebody's burst-firing a hand cannon. :)
    1
  2386. I dunno, Doug, I decline to believe that Land Rover, as a company, gives one-tenth of one damn about the possibility of its customers taking out bicyclists.
    1
  2387. Ah, the classic "trade delegation". Not really about trade since... well, whenever they were invented.
    1
  2388. Groovy. (I can't believe nobody else said that yet.)
    1
  2389.  @dedalliance1  And leave the country.
    1
  2390.  @garthdyland.6258  There are .25-caliber rifle cartridges which would be reasonably effective (certainly better than .22 LR), but an AR-7 is too small and lightweight to be rechambered for any of them.
    1
  2391. Back in the days when "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" wasn't quite as dismissive a remark as it would be when it was actually made.
    1
  2392. In which Columbia Gas demonstrates the kind of competence and focus on quality normally associated with PEMEX.
    1
  2393. ... As opposed to the eight operated by the entire rest of the world.
    1
  2394. If you pitched something like this as a screenwriter, and then told the producer, "And the guy's name is Crush," he would tell you to get the hell out of his office. It's just too on the nose. Also, fun side fact: The M-K-T was immortalized by blues musician Taj Mahal in the 1968 song "She Caught the Katy", which was covered in 1980 as the opening title theme to The Blues Brothers.
    1
  2395. This makes me think of the humongous research laser in the roughly contemporary movie Real Genius, which was based on real hardware in use in physics labs of the time (before the fictional upgrade that turned into a five-megawatt death ray). Nowadays, laser researchers can probably carry around lasers as powerful as that one in their shirt pockets. :)
    1
  2396. Oh, that's what the story is with that red Nova. I notice it whenever it turns up in one of Tyler's videos, because my grandparents had one like it back in the day.
    1
  2397.  @yank-tc8bz  And Aéropostale. Really shake up those "fast fashion" people.
    1
  2398. 5:04 Man alive, look at the gap at the back of the door. Good thing it's in a place that doesn't have proper winters.
    1
  2399. Red Rock Canyon, huh? Watch out for those Khans, man. They'll mess you up.
    1
  2400. The whole purchase-by-invitation thing is a classic example of artificial demand, and it's carried on through to today's insane collector values for these cars. I mean... look at it. This was supposed to be the Ultimate Supercar, and it's so crudely finished as to seem like an incomplete prototype. But Ferrari being Ferrari, all they had to do was give it a special name and tell some rich people they couldn't have one, and suddenly everyone's raving about how Pure and Raw and Unsullied By Modernity it is. Which they're still doing 15 years on. Watch, some of them will probably jump on me now, for daring to call a road car with visible heater ductwork and no carpets crudely finished.
    1
  2401. (notices the Eiffel Tower-looking attraction in the wide shot of the theme park) Wait. Is this the same park with the... uh... elevator problem? I know it's just a coincidence if so, but still. Creepy. Viewers outside the United States may wish to note that the road shown is not an Interstate highway like the one on which the accident happened; those are limited-access divided highways, like motorways in the UK. As such, Mahoney didn't just stray across the double yellow, he drove down a clearly marked exit ramp onto the opposing side of a dual carriageway, passing at least two large red-and-white WRONG WAY signs in the process. (This is noted in the narration, but the B-roll footage doesn't match.)
    1
  2402. So... it's a Chinese Five-seveN. A Wu-qI, as it were.
    1
  2403. Fun fact: In vulcanology, "Plinian" is now a technical term for summarizing eruptions of a similar magnitude and type as the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius, because Pliny the Younger's is the earliest known description of one that goes into scientifically useful levels of detail.
    1
  2404. They should've called the Oregon DOT's Highway Division. They had by far the most practical experience of blowing up things beached along that stretch of the coast...
    1
  2405. I love when people rave about charge times in EVs these days, getting all excited because the current model only takes half an hour to (partly!) recharge. What is this ridiculous future we've arrived in?
    1
  2406. It's interesting that you didn't find much difference between the .32 and .380 versions. I've never handled a proper PPK, only the PPK/S version, but I know I've always found PP-style guns (PP, PPK/S, CZ 83, and so on) in .380 quite unpleasant. There's something really sharp and bitey about their recoil, and I would've expected the PPK's smaller grip to make it even worse.
    1
  2407. "You just went for a groom, how did you gain 20 pounds?!"
    1
  2408. Well, shit. I've been pretty sure this would be the outcome when the rumors first started going around, because we live in the timeline where we can't ever have nice things, but I still held out a little hope. That'll teach me. In 2007, I was offered the job of writing the coffee table book about the refit of United States for Norwegian by a contracting firm that was confidently planning to bid on the job. Then 2008 happened instead...
    1
  2409. In 1905, anyone of Army recruitment age would've had his left-handedness beaten out of him in elementary school. Heck, I had at least one grade school teacher in the late '70s who thought they should still be doing that kind of thing.
    1
  2410. "A well costumed Militia being necessary, to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and wear Garb, shall not be infringed."
    1
  2411. I suspect a key difference is that promoting a movie is just a matter of telling the audience (however stealthily) "this movie's cool, you should go see it," whereas Adam's description here sounds to me like a lot of the offers they turned down were from companies asking them to find and publicize deficiencies in competitors' products.
    1
  2412. Aeronautical engineer Nevil Shute Norway, who later became a famous novelist after omitting "Norway" from his pen name, worked on R100, and was in fact the project's chief engineer after the resignation of Barnes Wallis. In his memoir, Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer, he spent a fair few pages criticizing the harebrained idea to have two competing teams working on the airship project in the first place, the government's underhanded interference with the R100's development in order to prop up the R101 team, and the R101's design and construction. He was...let's go with not generous to the memory of Lord Thomson, in particular.
    1
  2413. Monitor is let down somewhat by the fact that she was barely seaworthy in anything but a flat calm. She was a revolutionary concept, but not really a very good ship.
    1
  2414.  @valeriekravette787  Heck, Alas, Babylon wasn't written all that long after people thought water infused with radium and thorium was a health tonic. (I wish I were making that up, but I'm not.)
    1
  2415. To be fair, the second thing on your list probably didn't exist yet when this product was made.
    1
  2416. Alfas were also reportedly almost unbelievably noisy, which is a significant shortcoming in a modern submarine.
    1
  2417. Tragically, you used the wrong kind of mustard at the end there, so we were denied the heartfelt declaration, "There's Poupon my pants!"
    1
  2418. To paraphrase James May about something entirely different, "It's like a supermodel smoking a pipe."
    1
  2419. As Mark Novak has observed, nothing is sailorproof; the best you can do is make it sailor-resistant.
    1
  2420. Now I'm thinking of those terminals in Fallout 4 where you find out how General Atomics made the Robobrains...
    1
  2421. But make no mistakes and switch up my channel I'm Buddy Rich when I fly off the handle What could it be? It's a mirage You're schemin' on a thing that's cabotage ... I'm sorry, I'll wait in the car
    1
  2422. My father had a Yorkie like that. That dog weighed about five pounds and would unhesitatingly have tried to fight a bear if he'd ever had the opportunity.
    1
  2423. "Super" and "Unique" are alternate names for premium gasoline in some markets. Mazda presumably didn't want to bother making different fuel door labels for those markets.  Also, another major drawback to the Wankel rotary engine is that it's spelled "Wankel", which is funny, but then people are disappointed when they learn a little German and find out it's actually pronounced "vonkel".
    1
  2424. Upon rewatching, I empathize with the Kimball pistol. I, too, have some interesting engineering features that don't work quite the way they're supposed to.
    1
  2425. THIS is is is is... is a room with surprisingly poor acoustics, given that it seems to have been set up specifically for people to record press videos of the car in it.
    1
  2426. Forgotten Weapons also did a video about a... well, HK will probably put me on some kind of list for calling it a competing product, but... a similar sort of thing made for one of the Ingram submachine guns, I forget which one. It's... rather less German in its design and execution. :)
    1
  2427. Awright, I'm gonna say it: That is ghastly. If Saddam Hussein and Liberace teamed up to decorate a gun, it would look like that.
    1
  2428. England invented the eccentric collector. :)
    1
  2429. And a pickup with a trunk.
    1
  2430. Or competition shooters being useless in a real crisis because they just stand there waiting for the timer to beep. (That was a joke. :)
    1
  2431. "CLEAR!" "WHAT?"
    1
  2432. 6:02 I'm going to assume this animal came from some other situation, but now I'm really enjoying the image of some rich idiot trying to keep a wild Bactrian camel as a pet. That would be the very definition of f-ing around and finding out. :)
    1
  2433. "The kinfolk said, 'Jed, move away from there. No, seriously, you're soaking up 2.5 grey per hour in that location.'"
    1
  2434. "Talk to me in the comments about products you are sad aren't as good as they used to be." ... Everything?
    1
  2435. I remember seeing a photo of a Komondor in an "all the world's dog breeds" type of book when I was a kid and thinking that it was a joke, à la the "spot the fake ad" feature in Games magazine back in the day. Like "that cannot possibly be real, that's one of those spinning things from a car wash." :)
    1
  2436. It's unclear how well the timing would work, but the first thing I thought when I saw that grip angle was "Someone at AEP saw a Colt 1910/1911 and liked the looks of the grip."
    1
  2437. To be fair, the interior materials may have come closer to matching when they were new, before they spent 30+ years fading at different rates.
    1
  2438. Having "the best open bolt smg ever made" is like having the best possible broken bone. Sure, you're better off than the poor guy with the compound-complex femur fracture, but you still have a broken bone.
    1
  2439. The Tarn itself was a failure, but we should keep in mind that it paved the way for the extremely successful Consarn pistol.
    1
  2440. This is the second time I've enjoyed some Grade A Schadenfreude at Steve Wynn's expense. (The first time being the famous incident when he stuck his elbow through a Picasso while being a rich asshole in its vicinity.) Like the meme goes, that's not a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
    1
  2441. How can the styling of any 911 version be "controversial" relative to any other version? They all look the same. They've always looked the same. Porsche hasn't had a styling department since 1965.
    1
  2442. I think it was that starry-night headliner, when it originally appeared in a Rolls-Royce concept car some years ago, that made Jeremy Clarkson declare that if they put it in a production car, they'll have to call it the Rolls-Royce Vulgarsonic. And, well, if anybody should know what makes a car vulgar... (Mind you, that particular concept car also had a light-up translucent Spirit of Ecstasy, which was akin to the time IBM ran full-page magazine ads touting that their latest model personal computer was, and this is a direct quote, "stoked with truly phat software." Stop trying to be cool, Grandad, it's agony. :)
    1
  2443. He was saying people who bought LS 400s didn't, which is probably true.
    1
  2444.  @skoopsro7656  Well, I mean, this thing is clearly the MP(20)40 from the alternate future where the Germans won the war...
    1
  2445. Is that... Domo-kun in a spacesuit?
    1
  2446. Plot twist: It turned out to be cheaper to ship the car from 1943.
    1
  2447. I find it interesting that, some time after Browning and Colt gave up on that slide retention/recoil spring system, it turned up on the Steyr M1912 (aka Steyr-Hahn). I guess the gang over at OEWG figured the possibility of the slide coming back in the shooter's face was worth the convenience of the captive recoil spring...
    1
  2448. Well, I'm jealous. I've got a Mitchell Arms American Eagle (stainless steel reproduction 9mm Luger from the '90s) that's never worked right. I'm kind of fond of it anyway, the way some people get perversely fond of old cars that have never run right, but one of these days I really would like to have a Luger that works. Doesn't necessarily need to be in .45, but still. :) Oh yeah, also: do you figure the grip angle may also have something to do with Luger-style magazines being so damn hard to load? I've got a Lahti L-35 that I would gladly pay someone else to just stand there and load for me, like a 19th-century English hunting gent and his shotgun wallah, if I had the money. Ruger Standards are a hassle too, and they all have that grip angle and that button magazine thing going on.
    1
  2449. Ah, good old vz. 52. Handsome from the slide rails up, but with all the grip ergonomics of a paperback book. :)
    1
  2450. He looks a lot like my childhood pal Rusty, gone these three decades and more. Reddish goldens like him went out of style for a while, at least around here, in favor of the really pale blonde ones; it's nice to see them making a comeback.
    1
  2451.  @kingssuck06  I did acknowledge that there was no practical alternative under the circumstances. That doesn't alter the fact that, as presented, it feels a bit... heartless.
    1
  2452.  @freddythecat3203  Ethical relativism is the refuge of the morally lazy.
    1
  2453. Battlefield Vegas is the weirdest of the Battlefield games.
    1
  2454.  @kimyoung3160  No, Costa Concordia.
    1
  2455. So... it's a sawed-off Rossi Circuit Judge carbine (that's where they got the blast shields, which is why they're optimized for the shoulder-fired stance even though this one doesn't have a shoulder stock), with some mall ninja doodads. Neat! Now I kind of want one just to complete the set.
    1
  2456. All thanks to our old friend, F=ma . :)
    1
  2457. I once detoured a trip to dinner with my mother to look at a nice secondhand BMW 3-series I was thinking of buying at a nearby Kia dealership. While I was looking it over, Mom asked the salesman and his hovering manager how they came to have it (BMWs are fairly rare in these parts, the nearest dealer is hundreds of miles away), and the manager said a member of local law enforcement had traded it in. "On a Kia?! " my mother demanded incredulously. "What's wrong with it, then?" They asked us to leave and not come back.
    1
  2458. The only proper SMG I've handled was an MP5 (I don't count my semiauto PPS, fond of it as I am), so I don't feel competent to compile my own top 5, but I will say that I've kind of hankered after a Reising M50 ever since you did a video on one a few years ago.
    1
  2459. Whenever anyone mentions the Hardballer, I think that AMT made the Portsider, look it up, and rediscover that they didn't, and then forget it until the next time I hear about a Hardballer again. Speaking of which, you should see if you can find a Portsider. I understand they weren't really very good, but hey, weird obscure left-handed 1911, that'd fit right into your milieu. :)
    1
  2460. Very disappointed that ALPHA isn't nicknamed "LORANskiy".
    1
  2461. If he wore a tie, he wouldn't be able to work on his Mercedes.
    1
  2462. IMFDB says it's an S&W Model 2 (the original 1861 .32-caliber Model 2, not the 1876 .38 Model 2). Also notes that it's anachronistic, since the movie is set in 1860.
    1
  2463. You know you're screwed when the only place to take shelter is the room full of fuel that is slightly less flammable than everything else that's already on fire.
    1
  2464. Maybe it comes out to round figures in metric money.
    1
  2465. It's pronounced "Fleetwood". :)
    1
  2466. Hey, I had that Richard Scarry book. Also a book called Big Joe's Trailer Truck, which my mother got for me because her brother, my favorite uncle, was a trucker. I haven't thought about either one of those books for years. Thanks for the nostalgia surge.
    1
  2467.  @christophermichaels  You're welcome! I'm glad I was able to help, I know how frustrating that kind of thing can be. Thanks for all the cool stories!
    1
  2468. Also, Victorian towns occasionally did explode, although that was usually because of poorly maintained gasometers or--and I'm not making this one up--haphazardly operated guncotton mills, not the telegraph network. Still, you can see where people who didn't know much about the technologies involved wouldn't care about the fine details.
    1
  2469. Upon rewatch, I have to confess: slightly disappointed that there's no such thing as an HK Briefcase Slap.
    1
  2470. @ghost mall The canonical example is Action Park in New Jersey, which was so notorious for visitor deaths and injuries that it earned the nicknames "Class Action Park" and "Traction Park".
    1
  2471. To be fair, Coyote rarely if ever uses the Acme products he buys in accordance with their instructions.
    1
  2472. "It has ergonomics problems" is an extremely diplomatic way of putting it. Personally, I'd have gone for something more like "it was evidently designed to be gripped by a robotic pincer rather than a human hand," but then I'm not speaking from CZ's own actual premises. :)
    1
  2473. The whole time I was eyeing that big ole dent in the magazine and unable to keep from thinking, "That will have caused some feed problems." I fear my subconscious mind has been prioritizing the wrong lessons from these videos. :)
    1
  2474. Much like all the other worlds we live in right now.
    1
  2475. My mom had an English springer spaniel like that. We could never decide whether he was the worst good dog or the best bad dog. :)
    1
  2476. There are whole rafts of studies in biochemistry, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology about what the hell is wrong with young men. The really, really short version is that humans are just apes who (usually) dress better.
    1
  2477. I love that the stock on the simpler one was visibly just profiled out of a 2×6.
    1
  2478. Contrary to that news report's assertion, there are other industries in which well-intentioned but negligent or incompetent workers can be subject to criminal prosecution if their mistakes endanger the public, but it depends on the country. Italy, for instance, has many well-known cases in its history where the people found responsible for dam disasters, bridge collapses, and whatnot went to prison.
    1
  2479. I'm so jealous. Your copy of Handguns of the World still has its dust jacket.
    1
  2480. Do hunters rage? I've always thought remaining calm would be a thing one ought to do when walking around in the woods with a gun...
    1
  2481. I know this wouldn't have happened even if the Mk I had been adopted, but I love the mental picture of an SOE agent and/or commando carrying a pocketful of little bitty stripper clips holding five rounds of .32 ACP apiece.
    1
  2482. "And in Pacifica... well... Pacifica is still Pacifica."
    1
  2483. There aren't enough bowling balls, mouse traps, or boots on sticks for it to be a proper Rube Goldberg mechanism. :)
    1
  2484. Wow, it sounds just like it does in Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It doesn't seem like the kind of gun there would have been a readily available sound effects library for in 2001, but...
    1
  2485.  @brittakriep2938  Most people buying a 1911 these days probably aren't planning to carry it for self-defense; in modern clothing, a handgun that big and square would be as obvious as trying to shoplift a microwave oven.
    1
  2486.  @emisformaker  Same. The golden retriever we had when I was a kid developed a seizure disorder in middle age, and when I think back on it, I can still feel the echo of the terror 12-year-old me felt when he had his first one. We kind of got used to it after a while, but the first couple left scars. On us, anyway. He didn't seem to know anything had happened when he came out of them.
    1
  2487. What the absolute hell? I could have sworn it was September, not April. Did the teleporter send me back in time again?
    1
  2488. Mine does that, I have an obscure love for it. Up to 99 is that many seconds, and then 100 is one minute.
    1
  2489. "In range?" "Not yet, sir." "Come on, come on!" "She'll fly apart, sir!" "FLY HER APART, THEN!"
    1
  2490. "Should you or any member of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in 30 seconds." (Also: I somehow never heard of this at the time, but I remember laughing out loud at the Circuit City employee who tried to sell me a DIVX deck...)
    1
  2491. It's probably more a function of time than mileage in those cases, since those parts perish through chemical change rather than mechanical wear.
    1
  2492. There was this period of about 15 months when it was really difficult to get a haircut, maybe you heard about it?
    1
  2493. "The one that used to be called Twitter" is still called Twitter, just not by the schmuck who owns it.
    1
  2494. And the Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell Lifetime Achievement Award goes to...
    1
  2495. If you ever wondered how that canned eggplant purée Scott's shot in other videos is made, 9:50 has your answer.
    1
  2496. Isn't that a little like saying a seat will hold a person minus the head?
    1
  2497. That'll kill you faster than doing the same thing every time Jay Leno says "back in the day".
    1
  2498. Gun jousting would be a little anticlimactic. Sort of the horseback equivalent of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy shoots the swordsman.
    1
  2499. I have a P1001-0 (East German PP copy) with a similar aesthetic to the trophy PP in this video (but with even cruder grips). It claims to have been made in Zella-Mehlis, although I've seen articles asserting that those markings were faked by Hämmerli when they exported these guns to the United States. Which is mildly disappointing, if true; when I first realized what it was, I was tickled by the idea. How much of a "copy" is it if it came out of the same place as the "real" ones? Either way, it's the most East German gun imaginable: obviously well-made by skilled workers from good materials, but entirely without adornment. It's decently blued, because they were Germans and they couldn't help themselves, but it barely has any markings (even fewer if the possibly-faked ones were in fact faked), and the grips are just plain, flat slabs of wood. And not even partcularly nice wood. Checkering? Nein. Magazine pinky rest? Nein!
    1
  2500. They really should've called it the 3822. I'm just sayin'.
    1
  2501. Something about the delivery of "They were pretty excited, they were gonna meet up with some girls they had... contacted..." just sends it.
    1
  2502. "Mo' fleet, mo' problems, am I right, folks?" - Mr. New Vegas
    1
  2503. "They gave us an engine that first went up and down / And then with more technology the engine went around / We know our steam and diesels, but what's a mainyard for? / A stoker ain't a stoker with a shovel any more."
    1
  2504. Computers have robbed Hollywood of the need to do anything this deranged ever again, alas.
    1
  2505. The meows when he gets shampooed up and rinsed a second time. "I thought we were DONE! What IS this?!"
    1
  2506. Nowadays the computers are pretty good at keeping you out of trouble.
    1
  2507. Does McLaren just not have a styling department?
    1
  2508. I remember seeing someone--it might even have been Ian, in his old video about the VP70Z--compare the trigger pull of a VP70 to an industrial stapler, the kind you put up insulation and ceiling tiles with. That might at least partially explain its terrible accuracy. You know, along with the short sight radius, stubby little barrel, silly length of pull, and the fact that Russian space rockets don't climb as energetically as that muzzle. :)
    1
  2509. I wonder if the Automatic Radar Plotting Aid (ARPA) was developed with funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
    1
  2510. It's a Walther P38 that wears Armani. :)
    1
  2511. Those paragraphs about not covering damage due to war, insurrection, nuclear waste et al. are in my insurance policy, too. I guess they're a standard industry way of weaseling out of worst-case scenarios. "... or if you were fool enough to street park it in Boston and the Patriots won the sportsball thing again."
    1
  2512.  @xanataph  Let's face it, if I'm ever in a position where I need to build my own radio receiver from scratch, odds are I'll have way bigger problems than the lack of a radio receiver in the first place.
    1
  2513. "Punt Gun Scope Kiss" would be a good name for a band. I'm just saying.
    1
  2514. Makes me think of the old U.S. Air Force joke that ends with, "General, I'm pumping shit out of an airplane at 2 AM in Thule, how exactly can you damage my career?"
    1
  2515. Captain King appears to have been under the anachronistic impression that he was conveying a shipload of, not paying passengers bound for the antipodes by choice, but convicts under sentence of transportation. I mean, he conducted himself eerily similarly to accounts of similar passages in the early 1800s, except that he stopped short of having people actually flogged to death, I suppose because he figured that wouldn't fly with the insurers.
    1
  2516.  @B52Stratofortress1  They'd probably have to be like those super-elaborate ones the Roth-Steyr used (which Karl amusingly described as "Gucci stripper clips" in an InRangeTV Q&A once).
    1
  2517. Aw, man! My first car was an '84 Toronado, and it did not have the Oldsmobile Complimentary Tape Cartridge. The first owner must have lost it. I never even knew I should've had one, which means now I'm experiencing disappointment 30 years after the fact. As for the cramped middle row, you said it yourself, Doug--the back seats were for the kids, most of whom were not six-foot-threeorfour. :)
    1
  2518. I minored in graphic design as an undergrad, and my favorite of the instructors in that program spent most of a class period one day just talking about what a crime against fontology Arial is. "Not only is it a cheap knockoff of Helvetica, it's a lousy cheap knockoff of Helvetica. I mean, look at this." He had slides. This wasn't a tangent, he prepared this lecture. :)
    1
  2519. I had one of these... briefly. I think its under-own-power to towed mileage ratio was about 2 to 1.
    1
  2520. I have an 1892 French ordnance revolver that I'm sure spent a while underground. It's not rusted into one solid piece, it still mostly works, but the finish has all the hallmarks and the original wood is long gone. Some previous owner very painstakingly made replacement grips for it out of what appears to be Plexiglas, which is kind of cool.
    1
  2521. The selector position for semiauto is labeled "R"? What does that stand for? The only thing I can think of is "Rapid fire", which would be kind of ironic, given that it's the slower of the two modes. Maybe it's some tortured expansion like "one Round at a time" or "Ration your ammunition, lads". :) Edit: Ohhh, "Repetition". That's... intuitive. I think I like "one Round at a time" better. It fits the aesthetic of other great British acronyms, such as SPLINK.
    1
  2522. Dang, Ian. I don't live anywhere near any major city, so the tour is unlikely to get anywhere near me, but I hope you get there anyway. Among other things, it would be the most poetic possible way to come out the other side of the pandemic.
    1
  2523. Is that school really OK with you filming pornography in their parking lot?
    1
  2524. Well, I mean, he's not going to hang around trading insurance details with people, he's Batman. Way too busy being one with the night for that.
    1
  2525. I wish you still had reason to come to Maine. Pennsylvania has weird acoustics. :)
    1
  2526. On top of everything else, "Eastcheap" is such a deeply ironic name for a street in that particular location that a screenwriter would get thrown out of the producer's office for suggesting it.
    1
  2527. The zombie bust tests are always simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, but that last one this time... yikes.
    1
  2528. Europe is small and crowded. Most of North America, not so much.
    1
  2529. Submarines are not well-known for their great visibility. They probably never knew that sailboat was there in the first place...
    1
  2530. "The whole thing's a phone!"
    1
  2531. Oh! This is the thing I posted about on your previous LD video earlier today. Time, it's weird on the Internet. :)
    1
  2532. Superimposed chambers, as opposed to superposed chambers, which are simultaneously loaded and not loaded until the shooter's decisions collapse the wave function and an outcome is produced. Little quantum mechanics joke for the gang at the back.
    1
  2533. On the rare occasions when this process has been shown at all in fiction, it's always some sort of low-key semi-mystical thing involving futuristic hand tools and some suspiciously finished-looking parts, but I love the idea of young Jedi doing it exactly this way--several days in a shop with a lathe, a mill, at least 75 percent of a plan, and a few engineering challenges that not even the will of the Force can help with. :)
    1
  2534.  @RaderizDorret  George V reigned from 1910 to 1936, by which time the matter was mostly settled. You're thinking of George III. :)
    1
  2535. Like playing "is that guy schizophrenic or just on the phone?" back in the age of Bluetooth earsets.
    1
  2536.  @carlam6669  The other chemicals also have distinctive smells, but stop bath is the strongest, most arresting one.
    1
  2537.  @joergmaass  And yet, they somehow still ended up trying to fight the Battle of Britain with 65-octane avgas.
    1
  2538.  @AlexStafford-h2b  Everything else he and his team tried at the time was either ineffective or had unacceptable side effects. For example, tellurium was a promising early attempt, but it had the unfortunate side effect of making treated fuel, engine exhaust, and everyone who worked with it stink to high heaven (reportedly the smell was similar to rotting fish, but many times more intense).
    1
  2539. @squiglemcsquigle8414  The lead issue was addressed (Midgley's publicity stunts and subsequent sick leave, the deaths at the Ethyl Corporation's plant and so forth). No one on Earth knew (or even could know) the downsides of CFCs until the 1970s, long after Midgley's death.
    1
  2540.  @squiglemcsquigle8414  A lot of things are "speculated for decades". They're still not known until confirmed, hence the phrase "no one knew".
    1
  2541.  @restojon1  They don't work as well for the things TEL was for, and I certainly wouldn't want to drink them, but they do make the exhaust gases less toxic and unlikely to spread very finely pulverized lead throughout the world, which is the main goal to which the other things were sacrificed...
    1
  2542. ​ @veritas41photo  It's not the only factor, for sure, but I think that "much" is misplaced. The engine designs in question depended quite a lot on the reliable availability of high-octane gas. Those two-stage superchargers on the later P-51 variants, for example, weren't going to accomplish much trying to burn 65-octane swamp water.
    1
  2543. A surprisingly un-weenie horn for this sort of car, especially from Europe. I was expecting one of those high-pitched "peeep" horns.
    1
  2544. And it has the same 120mm smoothbore gun as the Ford Fusion, so parts are cheap--wait, no, that's not true.
    1
  2545. Oh hey, I had a three-drum clock when I was a kid. From what I can recall of the styling and typography of it, I'd guess it was from the '50s sometime; I found it in a random yard sale my mother dragged me along to one day around 1980. I had it by my bed for years, but it was so long ago I'd forgotten all about it until you mentioned the type in passing here. I don't know what ever happened to it... probably got thrown out when my father moved out of that house while I was in college, along with a lot of my other stuff. His midlife crisis was... an event. :/
    1
  2546. Also, now I'm remembering a sketch comedy show (I forget which one, maybe Almost Live! ?) that did a fake ad for variants on this product that were triggered by other noises, including (if memory serves) The Screamer, The Shotgunner, and The Blow-to-the-Solar-Plexus-er.
    1
  2547. My gods, he does look a little like Robin Williams.
    1
  2548. Only American soldiers would find a way to be upset about not having to leave France...
    1
  2549. You can always spot the AI-generated rifles because they have the wrong number of fingers.
    1
  2550.  @JohnSmith-pl2bk  There's an early Auto-Ordnance magazine ad I've seen reprinted in a number of books that features an illustration of a man in a cowboy hat and chaps standing on his porch, blazing away with a Thompson gun at an assortment of men and horses in his front yard, with copy underneath explaining that you, yes you need a machine gun to defend your ranch against... whoever.
    1
  2551. I think I'd feel obligated to use recordings of jam bands, interspersed with advertisements for jam.
    1
  2552. I'm sure the police will also find that speed limit monitoring system helpful in their enquiries.
    1
  2553. To me, the best thing about the first one was that because the crucible fell in sideways, it basically converted into a little steam-powered rocket.
    1
  2554. You mentioned early on that we know more about outer space than we do about the deep sea. I think this incident illustrates one of the big reasons for that: weird as it may seem to say, surviving in outer space is easier, or at least presents lesser engineering challenges. For example, both involve pressure vessels, but all a spacecraft's has to do is keep a relatively small amount of pressure in. It's not like the near-vacuum of space gets more vacuum-y the farther out you go. The crew compartment of the Apollo lunar module was so famously flimsy that a carelessly handled screwdriver could easily puncture it. Meanwhile, Alvin is on its... third crew sphere, I think? At least third, possibly fourth... because to extend the vehicle's depth range, they have to replace the whole thing each time. Both environments want humans dead, but the deep oceans work a lot harder at it.
    1
  2555.  @mapesdhs597  Well, yes, obviously the vehicular parts are radically different, and launching a crewed vehicle into space is a significant emotional event engineering endeavor. However, in this instance I'm not talking about getting there and back again, only about not dying once you're there, and I maintain my contention--that part is easier in space. Not easy, but easier than at great depths.
    1
  2556. There's a joke in here about starting this madness with a martini, but...
    1
  2557. Hmm. Did you ever see an AMT Automag III, Ian? It's the only other .30 Carbine semiauto pistol I can think of, and I've always been kind of intrigued by them (and their .22 Magnum companion--am I imagining it or has there been an FW video on that one?). Never seen one in person, though, and I have no idea if they work any better than these things.
    1
  2558.  @edwinball985  "Make the phasers look less like guns" was a Roddenberry directive during the development of TNG. He was keen to play down the paramilitary aspect of Starfleet in that era, since he intended for it to be a promotion of the utopian future he hadn't had a chance to express out loud on the original show. And then he died, and the next Star Trek series his successors made (DS9) was literally a show about a space war. So, you know. The best laid schemes o' mice an' men, and all that.
    1
  2559.  @rubenskiii  Could be. For some reason "Panzer III road wheel" is stuck in my memory. It was definitely a plastic model kit of some WWII German vehicle or another.
    1
  2560. If I remember right, one of the two teams competing to raise the halves of the Titanic in Arthur C. Clarke's 1990 novel The Ghost From the Grand Banks used something like Hickey's iceberg method. It's been so long since I read that book, I can't remember whether they succeeded.
    1
  2561. The slo-mo Orbeez fallout on the table was weirdly satisfying.
    1
  2562. It's a shame they couldn't arrange matters so that the show-or-display bill was H.959.
    1
  2563. Darn it, there go all my hopes for shortening my commute.
    1
  2564. I find it especially funny that this enormous dog is named after the SI prefix for "one thousand", as in "he weighs as much as one thousand normal dogs."* :) * comedic exaggeration
    1
  2565. "Wonderful. Now I can flatten light ammo against body armor faster than ever before." - Shadowrun Street Samurai Catalog ca. 1990
    1
  2566.  @jamietus1012  Or that many hands.
    1
  2567. Yeah, I wondered about that. Diesel fuel isn't usually black.
    1
  2568. As these results make pretty clear, .455 Webley is a significantly lower-pressure cartridge than .45 ACP--which means if you find one of the Webleys that had their cylinders shaved, you should think twice about throwing .45 ACP through it. Keep in mind that, though they remained in service into the 1960s, these guns went out of production in 1924, so the absolute newest one out there is 101 years old... (Also, while I have my No-Fun OSHA Guy hat on: though it's undeniably cool as hell, popping a top-break open one-handed like that is much like flipping the cylinder on a modern side-swinging revolver--if you make a habit of it, over time you'll bend things.) Other notes: They did make speed loaders for the Mk VI back in the day, but they're quite rare nowadays, since they weren't a very popular item. They were expensive, and most officers figured if you needed more than six rounds out of your sidearm, your day had gone irretrievably wrong by that point anyway. They also made bayonets for them, believe it or not. Also insanely rare and expensive now, although I think there are some crappy reproductions floating around.
    1
  2569. Interesting! I remember seeing the US flag on a model of Titanic once and assuming it was there because IMM was an American-owned company (and thinking how that must have galled the British crew).
    1
  2570. "... and pop them down in the water, a bit like launching giant, deadly lifeboats." Deathboats, if you will.
    1
  2571.  @gergoantal1066  I believe it is, yes.
    1
  2572. It's spelled Raymond Luxury-Maybach, but it's pronounced "throatwarbler mangrove".
    1
  2573. My mother's tuxedo cat liked to stand on a high step of their staircase and put her head out through the banister supports to check out what was going on down in the hall... and then couldn't figure out how to get her head back out again. Beautiful, yes. Smart, on the other hand... (She also liked to watch TV, but only if the set wasn't turned on.)
    1
  2574. Maybe they should've tried propping the backrest forward with the dildo.
    1
  2575. special limited edition: "Bugatti Veyron EB 16.4 Édition Jacques-Yves Cousteau"
    1
  2576. I've commented on the Fiat in other videos about the Musketball I've seen, but this time the thing that really struck me* was the '89 Crown Vic, because I had one of those. The people who chose that car were brave, but also had to have been secure in the knowledge that if it did break down (as it was almost certainly going to, although I see in the photos at the end that they did make it), it would be the most comfortable place in the entire rally to await roadside assistance. :) * not literally
    1
  2577. "Your pantaloons are so fluffy!" "Unhand my pantaloons at once, woman! I shall write to my Member of Parliament about this!"
    1
  2578. What I've always wondered is, if his name was William Ewart Fairbairn, why was he called "Dangerous Dan"? I mean, I get that it's more alliterative than Dangerous Bill, but even so...
    1
  2579. 7:35 - "And now you know why you're not supposed to park here."
    1
  2580. Aw man, Ladder 1. I remember when the town bought that truck. It didn't fit through the rolling doors at the fire station, so they had to rebuild the front of the building. Rumor around town at the time was that the fire department had really just wanted to renovate the station, and when that was turned down, they turned around and "accidentally" bought a ladder truck that wouldn't fit through the doors. No idea whether the story was actually true, but it would have been perfectly in character for pretty much any department of the Millinocket town government in the '80s. :)
    1
  2581. Amusingly, if you treat the backwards N as a Russian И, the name is suddenly pronounced "Jimiy", like everyone whose dad had a GMC Jimmy back in the '80s instinctively thinks it should be anyway. :)
    1
  2582. I used to have a car that was built by Valmet (they made the convertible version of the old Saab 900 under contract). Wish I still had it.
    1
  2583. I don't usually bag on Doug's expressions of incredulity about things we know he's seen before, but that "non-OEM OEM head unit" thing made me scratch my head. I mean, surely he's seen any number of '80s German cars with Blaupunkt radios in them. :)
    1
  2584. Why would I be traveling with people who wouldn't be interested in the gun museum, though?
    1
  2585. You may be interested to know that most of this car's odder features--the funky repeater lights on the fenders, the hinged wood door pulls, and that yellow trunk button in the glove compartment, just to name three--were on my very first car, a 1984 Oldsmobile Toronado, so they were neither unique to this model of Cadillac nor particularly new in '89. In re the power output, it's worth keeping in mind that the air conditioners in those cars probably used up at least 40 HP before they ever reached the dyno. :) Also, as an aside, my favorite thing about The Penalty of Leadership is that, for no readily conceivable reason, every sentence begins with a pink pilcrow. Why? Not only is that normally a non-printing character, it indicates a new paragraph, which is clearly not happening there. Did the person who designed the manual just think it looked Old-Fashioned without knowing what it was for? That wouldn't surprise me much, come to think of it.
    1
  2586. 3:41 biblically accurate narrator
    1
  2587. So... Mercedes-Benz has its own in-house crazy performance shop, AMG; AMG has its own in-house even crazier performance label, Black; and now M-B has its own in-house mondo-luxo shop, Maybach. This means it's only a matter of time before we see a Maybach AMG Black version of something in their product line, and it will be this deeply schizoid thing that's trying to be Stripped-Down and Brutal and Ultra-Luxurious at the same time. Carbon fiber seats that are 15 mm wide but upholstered in baby seal leather. Automatic electronic everything but carpets made from recycled Tyvek homewrap to save weight. 250,000 horsepower, 275,000 torques, steering wheel controls for absolutely everything (except track advance, which still won't be on there), but no door pockets. Reclining heated massaging rear seat, but only one of them, and no front passenger seat because no one ever sits there anyway. Starts at €5 million.
    1
  2588. Probably--the same affordability factor that made them such popular police guns would also have been appealing to low-budget movie productions. I also have a vague memory of seeing them on a '90s TV show that I can't remember the title of now. It was basically a generic cop show, except set in the 2100s for no obvious reason.
    1
  2589.  @raeperonneau4941  heh, same. Also, "If you wanted me to stand, you should have put me in a bigger tub."
    1
  2590. https://www.headstamppublishing.com/french-rifle-book
    1
  2591. Don't forget the toothpick and tweezers.
    1
  2592. It's out there, Shane, in second-or third-hand cars owned by people who are silently annoyed by, but resigned to, none of it working.
    1
  2593. "Danger? Uh, yes! Definitely danger." #qotd
    1
  2594. To paraphrase Mark Novak, nothing is soldierproof; the best you can do is make things soldier-resistant. :)
    1
  2595.  @sultanofswing7198  So that's basically the cops saying, "You might as well ignore that law because we can't enforce any of the other ones either." Nice.
    1
  2596. "Do you like tubes?" Wait, wrong breed.
    1
  2597. I love the selector markings on HKs. "No bullet. Bullet. Bullet bullet."
    1
  2598.  @ScottKenny1978  Well, yeah, I know why they do it, I just think it's funny. :)
    1
  2599.  @ScottKenny1978  That works, especially nowadays...
    1
  2600. Most ammunition was probably still imported at the time. There were embargos on military supplies, true, but we should all know by now how effective those are.
    1
  2601. Adam: "Animals do not vocalize on your calendar." (black-and-white flashback) Jamie: "Quack, damn you."
    1
  2602. @ Fire Department Chronicles? That guy's fantastic.
    1
  2603. ("fire hole" joke redacted)
    1
  2604. Why did they name it after a 25-year-old sci-fi action movie?
    1
  2605. The language selector reminds me of the old Dara Ó Briain joke about DVD player menus, how you're always tempted to pick Suomi just to see what it's like, but you're too afraid that you won't be able to figure out how to get back out of it.
    1
  2606. Huh, long recoil. You don't see that very much any more. It's the Remington Model 8 from Hell.
    1
  2607. I handled one of the modern semiauto Thompson lookalikes a while back, and was astonished at the length of pull. General Thompson must have been built like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
    1
  2608. It's the world's first straight-push bolt-action.
    1
  2609. I test-drove an Accord a couple years ago, I don't remember the speedometer in it going to 220 miles per hour. I'm just saying. :)
    1
  2610. Be sure to buy a Beretta. I mean, it's only appropriate.
    1
  2611. I choose to believe that the guy who built this had counter-calibrations for all its weirdnesses in his head and could use it effectively, secure in the knowledge that no one else on the planet would ever be able to make head or tail of it if it fell into their hands. That's almost certainly not factual! But I choose to believe it. That's how truth works in 2023. :)
    1
  2612. I tried out a Tacoma while truck shopping last year. It was nice, but I decided to go with a truck whose designers included door openings tall enough for an actual adult human to get in through, without removing his head and putting it back on once he's inside.
    1
  2613. "Big" wasn't a requirement in and of itself, just better doors. It was fine once I was inside, but crawling in and out of that mail slot a bunch of times a day would have broken my spirit within a month. :)
    1
  2614. Their "up or out" career path policy also forces out a lot of people who would happily and competently keep doing their low-ranking jobs forever if allowed to, effectively punishing them for wanting to keep doing something they're good at instead of becoming managers.
    1
  2615. Gyrojet, maybe?
    1
  2616. The car-in-a-box button clearly should either activate the deflector shields or deploy the armored cocoon, like the Batmobile had in the 1989 Batman movie.
    1
  2617. One of the terrible James Bond novels written by other dudes after Ian Fleming died has 007 being issued one of these as a sidearm, because the PPK was out of date. Evidently the author read some gun magazines and/or that year's Shooer's Bible and decided that this gun would be suitable because, being an HK, it must be a finely honed, supremely ergonomic precision instrument, right? (I can't remember if that was the same post-Fleming Bond novel in which 007 kills the bad guy with a Gyrojet. It might well have been.)
    1
  2618. Wait a second, the Finger of Blame is a Luger? That explains a lot...
    1
  2619. One of the tech companies I worked for in the '90s had a Silicon Graphics workstation with a humongous (for the time) CRT monitor. It worked fine, but something inside it was fritzed such that anyone who tried to pick it up would get a surprise unless they knew exactly how to do it. One day the person whose workstation it was got reassigned to a different office, and the Facilities Guy--let's call him Steve--decided he'd be a hero and help the li'l lady move that great big monitor. Before she could warn him, Steve swooped in, picked it up like he was doing that deadlift technique where they hold it to their chest for a second, and took however many electrons it was holding straight to the solar plexus. Dropped him like a poll-axed ox. Through more luck than judgment, that was not the end of Steve, but it was the end of the SGI, which was probably just as well.
    1
  2620. - Ye gods, those stupid wheels. It reminds me of how you can put any wheels on any vehicle in GTA 5. This one is like someone rocked up to Los Santos Customs in a Sand King and was like, Yeah, those wheels that come on the Zentorno sound about right for this application. - Also: wow. That abstractified Ram logo looks even more like a chrome uterus than the old one. - I love the edit at 13:54.
    1
  2621. Ah, to be young and free in a land where a man can stab another man in the back "in self-defense".
    1
  2622. Do the red-edged white Xes mean "this signal is defunct" or the like? "Never mind about this, it's abandoned but we're not going to take it down because you never know, might need it again one of these days"? I'm sure this is a blindingly obvious cultural thing to folks in the UK, but I haven't seen an equivalent to it here in the US. When our railroads abandon stuff, you can generally only tell from the rust. :)
    1
  2623.  @VespaT5  Aha, thank you. They looked like they might be newer than the rest of the signals, so I wondered if they might be some kind of retrofit that was added when they were decommissioned.
    1
  2624. My favorite forward assist is the one on the .22 LR version of the HK416 (at least the older Walther-made version, I dunno about the ones built by Umarex). It does absolutely nothing--isn't connected to anything at all--but they still put a spring in it and made it feel like it's working. That's your Germans for you.
    1
  2625. Ah, I do love an oddball Hi-Power. I just picked one up today that has Mauser markings. I gather from a poke around online that it's really a FÉG 9HP in Mauser drag from the '80s, which is one of those things where you wonder who even thought of doing it. :)
    1
  2626. My late grandfather (U.S. Army Reserve, 1952–1968) swore by these things for the ~70 Maine winters he had to get through in his adult life. Heck, for all I know, he had the same pair the whole time. :)
    1
  2627. More companies should do stuff just because it would be cool. That kind of thing led to some of the best products of the 19th and 20th centuries, but it's largely been lost nowadays.
    1
  2628. What kind of psychopath would murder a 1958 Roadmster?
    1
  2629. This invites a new version of one of Thomas Dolby's best songs. "All of our submarines are missing tonight..."
    1
  2630. 7:21 "This thing really doesn't look much like a gun to most people." Well, except for the sights and the ejection port with the obvious bolt inside it. :)
    1
  2631. "Violence is not the answer. Violence is the question. The answer is yes."
    1
  2632. If you want to see exactly how your Frommer Stop works, and you don't dare try to take it apart, Handguns of the World is the book for you.
    1
  2633. It would never have occurred to me to shop for range targets at TJ Maxx. :)
    1
  2634. The rest of the car looks decent--I dig the front indicators--but that godawful mangled-cheese-grater grille ruins it for me (as it does on basically every modern Lexus). And the wheels are stupidly big, but that's pretty much every performance car made since 2005. It does have a nice interior, though, and when you're driving it you can't see the grille or the stupid wheels, so, take the win, I guess. :)
    1
  2635. Note: Claudene was a descendant of Fletcher Christian; he was her ancestor.
    1
  2636. That little cargo area under the hatch is like the one in '80s Camaros, it has a singular purpose: to be big enough to keep a bag of cement in so there's some weight over the drive wheels. ;) (SOURCE: I live in Maine, I had an '89 Camaro for several years, and I was not killed to death in the winter.)
    1
  2637. Oh don't you give me none more of that Old Jenks Carbine No don't you give me none more of that Old Jenks Carbine For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry, and I may die Won't you load me one more of that sinful Old Jenks Carbine - traditional Army carbine trials song
    1
  2638. Nothing summarizes Bentley in the '90s better than the fact that they went to great lengths and spared no expense to make the interior completely full of beautiful and carefully matched materials... and then put in that godawful black steering wheel with its hideous early-airbag center section.
    1
  2639. <Egon> McCollum, shorten your stream, I don't want my face burned off.
    1
  2640. "... and in conclusion, good day to you, sir. I SAID GOOD DAY!" (flounces off upstairs) "Dummkopf." (returns to nap)
    1
  2641. True fact:* this was filmed last Friday! It's just what June is like in Finland. *for values of "true" that include not being in any way true Trivia: The manual for MicroProse's old M1 Tank Platoon game described the T-55's successor, the T-62, as "a fine tank for robotic dwarves, but a very poor tank for humans," while noting that its ergonomics were actually better than the T-55's, which was summarized as "barely adequate". Mind you, that game came out during the Cold War, so there's a certain degree of bias to be expected about the Bad Guys' vehicles, but still. That nicely turned phrase has stuck with me for all these years. :)
    1
  2642. For some values of "high functioning".
    1
  2643. 4:08 They should use that as a promotional blurb on next year's brochure. "'Less total garbage than I was really anticipating,' says Forgotten Weapons' Ian McCollum!"
    1
  2644.  @jpdemer5  Yeah, the tag thing is fair enough, but I've bought a couple of things recently that had the tie without a tag. Just there for no apparent reason. (As for the proof-of-new idea, I would think anybody up to shady electronics resale would just... put on a new one.)
    1
  2645. Wish I could find my tennis elbow brace. :( BTW, the camera in the time-lapse at the very end makes the shop look huge. It's amazing what a difference lens choice and placement can make.
    1
  2646. It's also the only mid-size SUV I can think of that shares a name (phonetically, at least) with a brand of cheese!
    1
  2647.  @Asterngeisha  I liked the one I used to have, but apparently not a lot of other people did, since they don't make them any more.
    1
  2648. This gun's name reminds me of the time they built an electric car (... of a sort) on Top Gear and named it Geoff.
    1
  2649. The spirit of Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax smiles upon this pistol.
    1
  2650. It makes me think of Mark Twain's description of his "dismally formidable" traveling companion Mr. George Bemis in Roughing It. Bemis had an Allen & Thurber pepperbox revolver, which Twain celebrated for its inaccuracy, then noted, "Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it." This thing is basically a pepperbox designed to chainfire, and that's pretty cool. :)
    1
  2651. It particularly annoys me that the Hi-Power has a magazine safety specifically because the French required it for consideration in their 1930s pistol trials, and then they... didn't adopt the Hi-Power, so the final design has one for no real reason. Merci, fellas.
    1
  2652. I feel like there was a missed opportunity at 7:47 to say "nothing's out of hand... as it were." :)
    1
  2653. It was a cheerful weapon--the "Allen".
    1
  2654. There's something strangely perfect about the fact that both sides not only claimed to have sunk more ships than they did, they claimed to have sunk ships that weren't even there. For instance, the lowermost silhouette on the board the sailor is pointing at in the photo at 28:23 is a Mogami class heavy cruiser, none of which were anywhere near Cape Esperance that night.
    1
  2655. Remember when the most elaborate lightsaber toy* you could get was the hollow plastic one with the holes that made it whistle unconvincingly when you swung it, as you were absolutely not supposed to do in the house? Pepperidge Farm remembers. * yes, I know this is technically not a toy, but I mean c'mon, it's totally a toy
    1
  2656. Oh hey, a Time-O-Lite®! My mom had one of those in her darkroom back in the day.
    1
  2657. "Last year, in early 2020"? Oh my God. The teleporter sent me back in time...
    1
  2658. I wonder if they ran into trouble launching Genesis as its own marque in part because people learned to mistrust the name from when the Genesis was a Hyundai model? I don't know what the four-door ones are like, but I tested a Genesis Coupe a couple of years ago and was shocked at how shoddy it felt. It was the only car I tested during the three or four months I spent shopping that felt so cheap as to suggest it might be unsafe. Dashboard plastic like the tray in a Whitman's Sampler, doors that closed with a noise like banging on a trash can, horrible seat in an awkward driving position that didn't feel entirely stable, steering that managed to be heavy and vague at the same time, boolean brakes, the works. I know Korean cars don't have to be like that nowdays --my dad's Kia wagon-sport-ute-remix thing is quite nice--but the 2-door Genesis was like a parody of itself. Really disappointing.
    1
  2659. On a point of order, all McLarens are supercars you can barely use.
    1
  2660. Well, it works for paratroopers, right? How hard can it be?
    1
  2661. Are you saying the Germans were digging in the wrong place?
    1
  2662. Red tablecloth collector has the coolest stuff.
    1
  2663. Now, now, let's be fair. They had at least three successes.
    1
  2664. "I go to the bathroom, and that shouldn't be an eventful thing." You're still young, sonny. Wait for it.
    1
  2665. Assuming that the list is confined to handguns that were issued by governments to their armed forces, the C96 may be excluded simply in the grounds that it was vanishingly rare. Only a couple hundred thousand of them were issued between the German and Austrian armies--which sounds like a lot, but is little more than a rounding error when you consider that the Germans alone started the war with nearly four million men under arms.
    1
  2666. "If you think you know what a Sampo is, write it down on a piece of paper, throw it away, and try not to think about it. You'll be glad you did." This seems like particularly good advice now that I've seen how that feed system works. :)
    1
  2667. When I worked as a student assistant in a university machine tool lab, the thing in there that gave me the biggest pucker was the bench grinder. Those few seconds between when you switch it on and when it gets fully up to speed, when you're about to find out whether this is the start-up when the wheel explodes, always felt like about an hour each.
    1
  2668.  @dabeste6163  (shrug) I was perfectly content to pay the cost of the old one doing its job faster. It's not as though I spent my days staring at my electric bill and muttering, "This dishwasher is going to banrkupt me, I've got to do something."
    1
  2669. Brian Lee ITYM "faaave hunnert".
    1
  2670.  @GunsNGames1  Germans, even Germans whose English is otherwise very good, notoriously have a hard time saying "squirrel". They keep wanting to put a V sound in it somewhere, and it just doesn't work. This was supposedly used as a test to flush out deep-cover German agents in England during the war, although as with many such stories, I have my doubts that it ever really happened.
    1
  2671. "Bentley Bentayga" sounds like either an up-and-coming actor or the drummer of a funk band.
    1
  2672. Fun fictional fact: The Lone Ranger used silver bullets because he owned a secret silver mine, not a secret lead mine. That's it! He wanted to safeguard his secret identity by having as few followable supply chains as possible, which meant making his own bullets from his own resources. (Presumably he made his own gunpowder as well? Don't think too hard about where the cartridge cases came from, or the fact that silver mining in the 19th century was so incredibly labor-intensive that he must have had a substantial labor force... who never, ever left the mine, which has unpleasant implications. :)
    1
  2673. "... which means when I'm not kissin' babies, I'm stealin' their candy" is an evergreen summary of the profession.
    1
  2674.  @Grebogoborp  That's still a moral victory, which, as we all know, is the best kind of victory. ;)
    1
  2675.  @con6lex  And the Remington Model 8/80 rifle, which is kinda-sorta the same action as the Auto-5.
    1
  2676.  @K1LL3RGRN  psssst, look again
    1
  2677.  @darthkarl99  Why should the homeowner be faced with such a mandate (and, thereby, yet another barricade in the path to home ownership) rather than the onus being placed on the constructors to build the damn things properly?
    1
  2678.  @darthkarl99  "Big storms" aren't a maintenance issue, they're an emergency--the kind of thing insurance is for. My objection is to the idea of carrying insurance for maintenance issues. If a structure's baseline maintenance requirements are so catastrophic that the residents need insurance to cope with them, it either wasn't built right or it's in a place where a residence has no business being.
    1
  2679. I will always be disappointed that Cadillac didn't call the Avalanche-based Escalade the "Escalanche".
    1
  2680. "This is a kinetic-kill, side-winder vehicle with a secondary cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine RDX burst. It's capable of busting a bunker under the bunker you just busted. If it were any smarter, it'd write a book, a book that would make Ulysses look like it was written in crayon. It would read it to you. This is my Eiffel Tower. This is my Rachmaninoff's Third. My Pietá . It's completely elegant, it's bafflingly beautiful, and it's capable of reducing the population of any standing structure to zero. I call it... the Ex-Wife."
    1
  2681. Any rifle is scopeable if you have enough gaffer tape.
    1
  2682. (Bob Newhart delivery) That's... that's what they are.
    1
  2683. "If you think you know what a Sambar is, write it down on a piece of paper, throw it away, and try not to think about it. You'll be glad you did."
    1
  2684. "'Some people are just thick or stupid.' ... Aren't they."
    1
  2685. They made Nagant revolvers at Izhevsk during the war. I've got one from 1944. So no, not exactly front-line equipment coming out of there at that time. :)
    1
  2686. Albuquerque, New Mexico.
    1
  2687. Every time he leaves the supermarket, the cashiers look at each other and shrug. "That guy must really like eggplant."
    1
  2688. It may be inelegant, but part of me can't help but love that they basically built a robot whose job is to take the cartridge out of the belt, put it in the chamber, then take the empty case out of the chamber and throw it away.
    1
  2689. True... two of 2002 Jamie would just have built things in silence, and two of 2002 Adam would've blown themselves up at some point. :)
    1
  2690. 7:50 The technical term for that effect is "haptic feedback", if you were curious.
    1
  2691. Why did Toyota have you review it inside an empty municipal water tank?
    1
  2692.  @joshuabessire9169  On the other hand, there is surprisingly little commercial passenger traffic to and from aircraft carriers.
    1
  2693. "You ate the entire pile of treats when I wasn't looking. You're guilty." "Non, je ne regrette rien."
    1
  2694.  @dudududu1926  Ah, modeled on the operational doctrine the Germans developed for their rocket-powered interceptors during the war.
    1
  2695.  @danielbishop1863  I hear strange rumors that there may be a couple in Denton, too.
    1
  2696. "It is their biggest auction, and they thought it would be cool to sell me all of the guns." :)
    1
  2697. With the best will in the world, I find it very easy to believe that numbers of this product went unsold. :)
    1
  2698. I've... never seen a washing machine that needed 240 VAC, although they do need a water supply, which I'm guessing even this monstrosity doesn't provide. :) Dryers, yes, at least the ones that don't take natural gas, but not washing machines.
    1
  2699. Houston's marksmanship with the .22s is why we have the sentence, "You'll shoot your eye out!"
    1
  2700. They made it to shoot dogs? Barbarians.
    1
  2701. Huh, and here I was just thinking, "Well, could've been worse, he could've been using old transformer oil."
    1
  2702.  @Shawn666Hellion  He has: https://youtu.be/-hUxx8ZVDgQ
    1
  2703. When I was a kid, I assumed the Dolby system was invented by Thomas Dolby, because as we all know when we're children, two things having the same name cannot be a coincidence. :)
    1
  2704. "... by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Models in the Struggle for Military Contracts".
    1
  2705. Same thing, really.
    1
  2706. Place your bets now: When these start coming onto the secondhand market in a few years, will any of them still have the Bluetooth speaker?
    1
  2707. It's like painless dentistry.
    1
  2708. secrets ets ets ets ets of of of of the universe verse verse verse
    1
  2709. Things I would not be comfortable doing, #82593 in a series: firing a bullet through the middle of a live explosive charge that is two feet away from my face.
    1
  2710. "Ka-TAH-din". It's the tallest mountain in Maine. Used to be spelled "Ktaadn", which is how Thoreau spelled it in his book The Maine Woods, the first part of which is about his trip to the mountain in 1846. Source: It's about ten miles from my house.
    1
  2711.  @charlesharper2357  On the other hand, a 180-pound/82-kilogram man (the maximum weight of an Apollo-era astronaut) in one of the long-duration A7LB suits used in the later Apollo missions, with the PLSS pack, lunar visor, and everything, has an all-up mass of around 400 lb(m) (ca. 182 kg), or more than double his mass in a shirtsleeves environment on Earth. Apart from the fact that the A7-series suits significantly hampered any task involving the use of both hands at once (see: Al Shepard trying to play golf on Apollo 14), which would have made a rifle very difficult to fire in any sort of proper stance, I doubt our hypothetical astronaut would find the recoil from a Garand particularly inconvenient.
    1
  2712. Theodore Roosevelt would probably still find a way to show up, though.
    1
  2713. The first vet I took my last dog to was in his seventies and as crusty as a fresh baguette... toward people. He had all the time in the world for dogs, but zero patience with colleagues who weren't as meticulous as he was with things like nail trims. Great guy. I was sad when he finally retired, though he had more than earned it by that point.
    1
  2714. In the classic 1965 card game Nuclear War, there is one and only one 100-megaton bomb card in the deck. If it's played and the dice roll for the attack outcome comes up "triple yield" (95–99 on a percentile roll), all life on Earth is wiped out and the game immediately ends with no winner.
    1
  2715. I'm always amused by HK's fire control iconography. I don't know quite why it tickles me so much, but it does. "No bullet. One bullet. All the bullets."
    1
  2716. As a lifelong Dog Guy who can't keep up with them physically any more, I sometimes think that it might be nice to have a cat around the place. Unfortunately, I'm also very allergic to them, so that's probably not a great plan. Also, his face during the bath was epic. "I know, buddy, it's OK." "It is clearly not OK, woman."
    1
  2717. I had never heard of this, but somehow it doesn't surprise me at all. It is, after all, from the same country that gave the world a van called the Bongo Friendee.
    1
  2718. It's the name of a family who run one of those sprawling megadealerships near where I live, which, since I started watching Doug, is always good for a surreal mental image when I pass by. "First I'm going to show you one of the Quirks of this dealership, his name's Jim..."
    1
  2719. I don't mind the styling of the wheels, but they're too big. I know, I know, that's the style nowadays, but seriously, tires are supposed to have sidewalls.
    1
  2720.  @oplkfdhgk  [citation very much needed]
    1
  2721.  @ScumfuckMcDoucheface  This made me curious, so I looked into it a little. I'm not sure when new cars in Canada were first required to have catalytic converters--in the US it was the 1975 model year, so I'd be very surprised if your family's '81 Cavalier didn't have one--but it looks like Canada banned leaded gas from sale for on-road automotive use in 1990. It remained legal to sell at US gas stations until the end of 1995, although by then most stations had long since stopped carrying it for lack of demand. I remember having to buy separate little bottles of lead additive to put in my 1968 Pontiac circa 1991 because no station near me still sold what we used to call regular gas.
    1
  2722. "We don't trust the British. We'd better talk to the Americans if we want a fair deal." It's weird to think that the world ever worked, or even seemed like it would work, like that.
    1
  2723.  @baneofbanes  I know, that's what's weird about it.
    1
  2724. I have to wonder who was taking readings in that time and place.
    1
  2725. Eyeing your big shelf of Warship enviously. I've only got them back through 2015; before that, everything I've found so far's been too rich for my blood. :)
    1
  2726.  @AFnord  Yeah, I remember washing the drum out of mine in the bathtub. It was too big to go in the sink.
    1
  2727. Amazingly, the radiotherapy machine in this incident was not manufactured by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.
    1
  2728.  @KevinJDildonik  To be fair, if you had his job, you'd probably be an alcoholic too.
    1
  2729.  @ananthropomorphictalkinggo6641  Besides which, being concerned about lead's potential as a carcinogen is like worrying that the field of daisies you're falling toward without a parachute might bother your allergies.
    1
  2730.  @44R0Ndin  In this instance, we're talking about a brass-faced gunsmith's hammer--wooden handle, steel head, faced with a brass disc about the size of a stack of two dimes. It weighs only a few ounces, of which maybe an ounce is the brass bit. Whatever the alloy's precise composition, I sincerely doubt it would be possible to get lead poisoning or cancer from that. Perhaps if you ground it up and snorted it, but then you'd have bigger problems.
    1
  2731.  @44R0Ndin  You should probably have saved that for your doctoral dissertation on risk management, although I suppose it's unlikely that you'd get caught if you recycled it.
    1
  2732. This car makes me regret even more that we never got the Daihatsu Copen in the US.
    1
  2733. Oh, so that's why the tape deck in my old Pontiac kept either autoreversing or just ejecting the one of these I used to have. The "pretend you're a real tape" spindle mechanism must have been jamming. And all these years I've been blaming the Pontiac.
    1
  2734. With an E, someone respects the classics. :)
    1
  2735. I wonder if it's even possible to arrange a visit to Bannerman's Island now that the castle has started falling down. Public safety concerns and all that. Rather a shame.
    1
  2736. Socialist Realism damascening. Now I've seen everything.
    1
  2737. Not only does it have the same layout as a McLaren F1, it has a separate key for each lock on the vehicle, just like a Duesenberg Model J!
    1
  2738. I'm slightly amazed that you mags-dumped the 3822 and we didn't see Councilman Jamm once.
    1
  2739. I assume the serial number prefixes mean these were made as a special presentaton package for Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
    1
  2740. "A retro throwback to the early 2000s." That makes me want to go to a beach and walk out into the sea, returning to the deep until the Surface World needs me again.
    1
  2741. Well, yeah, they had a bird strike. Their bird struck the water. (Also, this might be the first time in many years of being an aviation nerd that I've ever been positively impressed by an ATR. They can't handle ice, it seems, but they're pretty tough.)
    1
  2742.  @therideneverends1697  I'm no expert, but I left it with a gunsmith downstate for several months a couple years back, and he finally said he couldn't find the parts necessary to make it safe to shoot anywhere, and would I please come and take it back.
    1
  2743. Box cannon forever!
    1
  2744. It's sort of like how flying is the safest way to travel. Doesn't meant you won't end up in tiny pieces at the bottom of a smoking crater in Iowa; just that the numbers say that outcome is vastly less likely than getting to your destination intact.
    1
  2745.  @Pallium_Industries  To be fair, "M&Ms" is a trademark.
    1
  2746. I've always assumed that the weapons in the original Star Wars were based on WWII guns because the interiors were shot at Elstree Studios in England, and English prop departments in the '70s would have been stuffed full of guns from the period at that time, since WWII movies were one of the island's chief exports between 1945 and about 1980. :)
    1
  2747.  The Bump Test Guy  Depends on the state.
    1
  2748. There were five Type IXC U-boats left at the end of the war, but the fifth, U-511, was part of the Imperial Japanese Navy under the alias Ro-500 by that point. She was scuttled by the US Navy in 1946.
    1
  2749.  @Quasihamster  M-x get-bent
    1
  2750. Does the Type 14 also have that "bolt stays open, but only until you pull the empty magazine" quirk, or is mine just broken?
    1
  2751.  @ForgottenWeapons  Excellent, thank you.
    1
  2752. "It's an ingenious solution to a problem that should never have existed in the first place." - James May, about something completely unrelated
    1
  2753. About 10 years ago, when I was an undergrad student at my local university, I noticed a flyer for an upcoming student group trip taped to the entrance door to the engineering tech building. One of the mechanical engineering tech student societies was organizing a group outing to a nearby casino, where they had been promised special insider access... to the building's HVAC systems. That's how we partied at my school. :)
    1
  2754. The thing with the "target sights" reminds me of that goofy stunt Ford got caught pulling with Transit Connect vans, where they were all imported as "passenger cars", and then a percentage of them had the rear seats torn out and rear windows replaced with welded blank panels. Et voilà, utility vans without incurring the dreaded Chicken Tax. As I recall, U.S. Customs was not as amused by that trick as I am when they finally figured it out.
    1
  2755. The address for H&R looked familiar (I used to live in that part of Worcester, years ago), so I got curious and looked it up on Google Maps. It's the big lot on the corner of Park and Chandler, not far from the old New England Envelope... and it's a Walgreens parking lot now. :/
    1
  2756. AKs are like sharks. They don't require parenting, they're ready to get busy putting teeth into stuff the moment they pop out.
    1
  2757. "Thanks for subsidizing the full development of the car, early adopters! Love, Toyota."
    1
  2758. "I think you'd be all right, as long as your buddy wasn't covered in tartar sauce and other condiments." Pretty sure no one has ever said those words in that order before in human history.
    1
  2759. I'm leaning toward "preposterous".
    1
  2760. Alas, poor Dak. For some reason, seven-year-old me was more upset by his body getting crushed with the speeder than anything else in what is, in hindsight, an unusually violent and mayhem-filled movie for one with a PG rating. (A few years later, I assume it would've been rated PG-13, but that rating didn't exist yet in 1980.) Even the fact that he died didn't bother me as much as what happened to him after.
    1
  2761. It must have been... exciting... to fire that thing from the back of a Jeep.
    1
  2762.  @robertkubrick3738  I hope not, with four targets to engage. :)
    1
  2763.  @robertkubrick3738  The casual insult gives your missed-the-joke reply that certain something.
    1
  2764.  @robertkubrick3738  Dang. I dunno who pissed in your corn flakes this mornng, but throw them out, get yourself a fresh bowl, and calm down, tough guy. (Besides, the character's name is Sadako in the version I saw.)
    1
  2765. Huh, I'd never heard of this breed. Cute!
    1
  2766. Incredibly, there was a shift change, but it didn't contribute to the accident and so wasn't counted on the bingo card. :)
    1
  2767. These guns are a physical embodiment of what it feels like to have imposter syndrome. However good your work objectively is, you're convinced it's basically this, and everyone else is going to notice.
    1
  2768.  @FreejackVesa  With the right software, most modern smartphones can even detect and measure ionizing radiation, albeit not with the same level of precision that a real radiation survey meter can.
    1
  2769. At least someone at the company had a sense of humor. Why else would they have trademarked the common slang term for a homemade piece-of-crap gun that's as likely to kill the wielder as anybody else?
    1
  2770. Huh, wow. There's a tower very like the one shown at 2:42 on Hillside Avenue in Bangor, Maine that I've idly wondered about since I first noticed it as a little kid in the mid-'70s. I've always kind of tacitly assumed it had something to do with a nearby radio station, but a look on Google Street View shows that the building it stands next to does, in fact, belong to AT&T. I'm no expert, but it doesn't look to me like they're using the tower for any more modern antennae today, which makes me wonder if they're just keeping it there as a local landmark. Either way, lifelong mystery unexpectedly solved by a YouTuber thousands of miles away. :)
    1
  2771. * batteries not included
    1
  2772. Heck, this is his job. For all we know, his hobbies are tennis and philately. :)
    1
  2773. Felt recoil is always a super-subjective thing, but based on my experience, I'd say that out of bolt-action rifles of similar lengths and weights, 7.62×54R > .303 British > .30-'06 Springfield > 7.62×51 NATO (the last out of an Ishapore 2A1, which is virtually identical to a Mk III SMLE apart from the chambering).
    1
  2774. Seems like a reasonable reaction to me, considering that a) gardening was nothing like those people's actual job and b) it was somebody else's garden they were being forced to weed.
    1
  2775.  @MikeLikesChannel  Wait, is there "gear" in soccer? Shirt, shorts, shoes... that pretty much covers it. Even if you had to bring your own ball, how much room do you need for that? :)
    1
  2776. My favorite thing about the concrete truck explosion is that it made such a tremendous noise, the audio equipment couldn't cope and just rendered it as a sort of twangy squeak.
    1
  2777. Or John Donne, I hear he's very litigious.
    1
  2778.  @yorick6035  They don't like it up 'em. They do not like it up 'em.
    1
  2779. It faints as a defense mechanism, like a goat.
    1
  2780. "In concept, this is pretty clunky." I don't know, I mean, it's all relative. Compared to a Howell device, this thing is elegance itself. :)
    1
  2781. I think I remember seeing this in my grandfather's Shooter's Bible back in the day, alongside the P5, and wondering why they had two products that were basically the same thing.
    1
  2782. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Air Force was thinking, "Bombing ships is a pain in the butt. We'd rather just shoot them, but how? Hey, what if we stuck a 75mm artillery piece on a Mitchell medium bomber?" And thus, the B-25H was born. (It was also very impressive but almost entirely useless. But the version where they took off the 75 and just stuck on as many .50-caliber machine guns as the nose would hold was pretty handy for ground attack)
    1
  2783. There are two distinct points in this video where Tyler visibly stops himself from saying "clusterf*ck", and it would have been the correct word both times.
    1
  2784. In 1985, I had a social studies textbook that was 10 years old at the time. It contained a similar assertion. So, you know. Maybe qualify your usage of "very soon". :)
    1
  2785.  @noremorsewoodworking2258  ISeeWhatYouDidThere.jpg
    1
  2786. My fridge makes a neat jet-engine noise when it starts up, but I assume that's more the whine of the fan coming up to speed than anything to do with the compressor.
    1
  2787. Nifty. I remember these. My father instantly dismissed all of the fancy parts as things that would break and cost a fortune to get fixed, as was his way. And he was right, which was not as automatically true. :) As an aside, that "by Buick" badge style wasn't unique to the Reatta. My mother had an '88 Regal that was badged the same way.
    1
  2788. I love that this car wasn't built for export, and yet the buttons are labeled in English. Also that it's the Hyundai Horse.
    1
  2789. Provenance note: These pistols were custom-ordered for a duel between Captain James Hook and Tinker Bell, but never delivered due to the unreliability of the Neverland postal system.
    1
  2790. There's a real "Let's" brand of beer in Japan; I've seen their kegs in travel videos.
    1
  2791. That " Enterprise lights come on" sequence from TMP was so iconic, they straight-up re-used the footage in Star Trek II.
    1
  2792. I'll be honest, I was expecting the postscript to be something like, "Of course, McLaren found out someone had actually driven one of their cars fast and instantly canceled the warranty, but, you know, into each life a little rain." :)
    1
  2793. "This was no boat accident!"
    1
  2794. Besides Alsace-Lorraine. And Switzerland.
    1
  2795.  @JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries  And especially a Nagant. :)
    1
  2796. "Now I know what you're thinking. Did he fire one shot, or only none? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I've kinda lost track myself. But seeing as this is a .600 Nitro Express, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off even if it hit you in the chest, you have to ask yourself one question. Is this guy out of his dang mind?"
    1
  2797.  @SilveniumTheDrifter  There was a PBS Independent Lens documentary called Brakeless about it, and I think also an episode of Seconds From Disaster, but I don't know whether either one is available to be viewed online now.
    1
  2798. His mention in this video reminds me that I doubt there will ever be a better gun designer name than "Søren Bang".
    1
  2799. The USN of that era liked to do that kind of thing. Fleet submarines had a similar sort of incremental progression (Gato->Balao->Tench).
    1
  2800. Well, I mean, they lost a $5 million drilling rig, that's not nothing.
    1
  2801.  @scottbott8525  We used to call them "dirt roads", before people who liked to drive on them changed the jargon so they could claim to be "off-roading".
    1
  2802. One of the critical components of the automatic screw machine is a part called the lead screw half-nut. I think machinists must not get out much.
    1
  2803. I haaaate bridges you can't see across. We have a real winner here in Maine, the bridge connecting Deer Isle to the mainland. It's not terribly long, but it had to be built very tall and there wasn't room for long, gradual approaches, so it's ridiculously steep. Even on a clear day, coming over the top of that bridge is a total dice roll, because you have zero way of knowing what's waiting for you on the other side. Traffic jam? Accident? That side of the bridge has collapsed? If there's any kind of problem over there, you'll find out when you hit it. The thing that really riles me up about the Deer Isle bridge is the reason why it's so tall. It does cross a shipping channel, but it's far taller than it would need to be to accommodate modern shipping, thanks to a yacht club that sued to force the bridge builders to account for their toys.
    1
  2804. I used to test the GFCI outlet in the bathroom of my childhood home faithfully on the first of each month. I had no idea what it did or was for, probably until I was in high school, but as soon as I was old enough to read the instruction on it, I followed it. I was... just that kind of child. :)
    1
  2805.  @RevMikeBlack  Wait, wait, buried lede. The police have chaplains?
    1
  2806. Whenever Doug does a supercar or modern luxury car, I play a little game where I count the number of times my father would dismiss a feature as something that's just going to stop working and be a pain in the ass. This car has relatively few, but six of them are to do with that silly window geometry. :)
    1
  2807. "Now, when you close the hood" (bank vault noise)
    1
  2808. Everyone's dropping the Incredibles reference, so I figured I'd go a little farther back. All McLarens are equal, but some are more equal than others.
    1
  2809. Fun historical tip for anyone who enjoyed the "rifle designations" question: If you really want to fall down a rabbit hole of convoluted military equipment nomenclature, check out the way the U.S. Navy designated aircraft before 1962. Boy howdy.
    1
  2810.  @emerybonner7973  Yeah, true, that certainly didn't help. And the year after that came Lusitania (another much more famous liner even before she was sunk).
    1
  2811. Ah, another gun in the grand tradition of guns with grips designed to be used by Lego minifig pincers.
    1
  2812. I love all the people in these comments grumbling that no car is worth three megasimoleons. Well, duh, obviously. Being worth what they charge for it is so not the point of this car. :) My favorite Bugatti story is about the marque's original founder, Ettore Bugatti. Legend has it one of his customers complained that his car didn't like to start in cold weather, and Bugatti witheringly replied, "Sir, if you can afford one of my machines, you can afford a heated garage to keep it in."
    1
  2813. Maybe they can get a recording of Othais from C&Rsenal saying "Bang," like they used to put in their Primer animations before they started taking the project more seriously. :)
    1
  2814. An acquaintance of mine in college (ca. 1991) built a rail gun out of an old daisy wheel printer once, just to see if he could. Technically it wasn't a proper mass driver, since the only thing the magnet accelerated was what used to be the print head (which would then shove the projectile mechanically off the end of the track it ran on), and it was horrifically inaccurate for obvious reasons. It also didn't have the best weaponization, since physically it was still... you know... a wide-carriage printer, which would be very awkward to carry around and aim one side of at things. It was capable of embedding a nickel in a sheet of plywood, though, which was properly terrifying.
    1
  2815. "The Soviet version has a much higher standard of workmanship" is what I believe the young people these days describe as "a whole-ass mood."
    1
  2816. As an aside to your note about Queen Mary representing the start of a new era with her naming's break from tradition: I don't think it was intentional, but I've long enjoyed the way Berengaria is sort of a bridge between Cunard's original naming convention and the modern one, in that her name ends in -ia and is also the name of a queen. :)
    1
  2817. Vadim blyat
    1
  2818. Unless you're the mayor.
    1
  2819. Wow, now that lights up an old memory track. When I was little, my grandparents ran a restaurant, and they had a pair of giant coffee percolators, one for regular, the other for unleaded decaf. The one they used for regular was the bigger of the two, and could probably make something like five gallons of coffee at a time. When it was running, instead of the little "perk perk perk" noise a normal one makes every second or two, it would sit silently for ten or fifteen seconds and then make this terrifying harrrrumph, like an elephant public speaker clearing his throat. As a very small child, I was quite frightened of this device. I used to try to time my passage through the dining room so that I wouldn't be right in front of it when it went off.
    1
  2820. 0:48 What maniac ordered a Countach in battleship grey? I salute you, unknown '80s rich person.
    1
  2821. He didn't say you'd sit there waiting for your kids...
    1
  2822. It would really amuse me if documentary evidence surfaced someday that the little knives on these things were never intended as part of the weapons package, but were instead just there to help the well-heeled Parisian street tough open his mail.
    1
  2823. Boy howdy. There's toxic smoke, and then there is toxic smoke. One of the principal byproducts of nitrocellulose combustion is phosgene--which would have been very familiar to the medical community of 1929, since it was the most lethal of the numerous chemical weapons used in the Great War.
    1
  2824. A rare appearance of the Unhappy Hoodie...
    1
  2825. All the disadvantages of owning your own home, combined with all the disadvantages of apartment living!
    1
  2826. When I think of 10mm, I automatically think of Colt, because the first time I ever heard of the cartridge was in a print ad for the Delta Elite. I'm pretty sure it was the only gun on the market that used 10mm at the time (since the company that made the Bren Ten had gone out of business by then).
    1
  2827. Oldsmobile also did cornering lights in the '80s; my '84 Toronado had them. It also had an equalizer, come to think of it. And very similar seat fabric! It didn't talk, though.
    1
  2828. Can confirm: I've never seen that movie, and I was completely mystified by the intro. :)
    1
  2829. Not to be confused with the very similar Smill & Wilson Chefs Special.
    1
  2830. Dwight's only strong reaction to anything was when you took apart his carrier, and he looked up in surprise like, "That comes off?!" :)
    1
  2831. Very like a number of people I knew in high school. heyooooo
    1
  2832. "Why drums are bad." Simple. Because when drums stop... bass solo.
    1
  2833. There are persistent rumors that Captain Harrison managed to survive, but chose (for obvious reasons) to let the world think he had died, assumed a new identity, and became a doctor. Years later, so the story goes, he was caught up in a bizarre incident involving an outbreak of food poisoning aboard an airplane!
    1
  2834. I nearly bought a used Lincoln a few years ago that had a THX sound system in it. Buried in one of the screen menus was a test function that would play the THX sound effect, like you hear at the beginning of movies. That feature alone almost sold me the car, if someone else hadn't come along and bought it by the time I made up my mind.
    1
  2835. Random word of the day: If you're painting, waxing a floor, or the like, and the pattern you use is left-to-right, then right-to-left, and so forth, the technical term for that is boustrophedon.
    1
  2836. Intuitive! :)
    1
  2837. Yep. Between the length of pull and the weird way the stock is underslung from the overhang at the back of the gun, I can only conclude that General Thompson was some kind of Jack Skellington-style stick figure.
    1
  2838. Amazing collection with a lot of nostalgia packed in. I remember lusting after the Dr. Grordbort's collection back in the day, especially the Manmelter 3600ZX. But even at the level of pay I was making at the time (tech-bubble money, how I miss you), I could never quite justify it, and now they're way out of reach. :/
    1
  2839. To paraphrase a New York Times review of Tom Lehrer's work that Lehrer was fond of quoting during his career: "Reichsmarschall Göring's muse was not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste."
    1
  2840. '80s Ford Tempos had those automatic shoulder belts, only they didn't have the emergency release up at the top. You couldn't unfasten the shoulder belt from anywhere. If it wouldn't run and you needed to get out of it, you had to flip a little lever down at the other end, by the center console, which disconnected the inertia reel so that you could pull out all the available slack. If that made it loose enough that you could get out, great! Mission accomplished. If not, call the fire department.
    1
  2841. And so another developer's customers learn the hard way that gravity is going to do gravity things regardless of how fast anyone talks. Once again a PD video brings to the front of my mind the late Richard Feynman's summation in the appendix he wrote for the Rogers Commission report on the loss of Space Shuttle Challenger : "Nature cannot be fooled."
    1
  2842. Plus side, super-cool stunt. Minus side, four-door Wrangler is a crime against nature. I guess it kinda evens out. :)
    1
  2843. I have my doubts about the seaworthiness of the ship shown at 4:53. Never mind armor, they really should have considered shell plating for the port side.
    1
  2844. Twenty-three skiddoo, ya buncha yeggs.
    1
  2845. I had a friend in high school whose family had an ancient Chihuahua. That dog was a friendly little bowling ball, but also the most food-defensive animal I've ever seen. Go anywhere near his corner of the kitchen while he was eating and he'd just stare you down with eyes of pure hatred (and cataracts), quivering with barely contained rage, until you left the room.
    1
  2846. Even in the days of black powder, in any situation where you might use one of these, I'm pretty sure I'd rather have a shotgun.
    1
  2847.  J-dayday  Pistols, sure. This thing? Eh...
    1
  2848. Watching the bipod skid around on the table made me think of that picnic table at James Julia, slowly disintegrating under the battering it was taking from the bipod on the Colt CMG3. :)
    1
  2849. Achtung! Kübelwagen!
    1
  2850. "What is this thing filled with, cotton candy?" Depending on its age, very possibly asbestos, so, y'know... maybe don't snort any more of the dust.
    1
  2851.  @robertsneddon731  I admit I'm not a casing-the-joint expert outside of GTA 5, but I feel like there are easier and cheaper ways to find that information out.
    1
  2852.  @vk2aafhamradio  We're not quite that advanced yet here in the woods...
    1
  2853. There are three mechanisms of evolution: natural selection, artificial selection, and autoselection.
    1
  2854. That first-pattern gun takes me right back to Castle Wolfenstein.
    1
  2855.  @jdl9679  Was it? I thought I remembered the first-pattern pistol grip. Ah well, it's been what, probably 20 years since I last played that game...
    1
  2856.  @thomasvanskiver7519  Which is weird, since they're not a jungle species; they live in grasslands.
    1
  2857. "Superior military capability rejected because it wasn't as good for target shooting" ranks up there with the old legend about why Teletype machines (which didn't have the bandwidth to transmit mixed-case text) printed in ALL CAPS. The story, almost certainly apocryphal but strangely plausible, goes that the company commissioned a study to determine which case would be better, received conclusive evidence that lower case had superior readability and clarity, and then went with upper case instead because, as the company's chairman pointed out, in lower case "it would be impossible to spell the name of the Deity correctly."
    1
  2858. Well, I went looking for blunderbuss content (don't judge me, it's a slow night), and... this sure is blunderbuss content! No false advertising here. :)
    1
  2859. I used to do that "carry a can of spray paint" thing too, but my vehicle at the time was a 1984 Chevy pickup with moon-shot mileage and a maroon vinyl interior, which is kind of less impressive in some ways. :) (I was in college at the time, so this was about 1993. I remember once a trust-fund kid ran into the side of the pickup with his Mercedes SL in the university parking lot while I was sitting in it. He hit me with his bumper, so his car wasn't damaged, but he was in an absolute panic about what his parents were going to do to him for, and I quote, "having another accident." I honestly couldn't tell which dent was the new one, so I told him to just forget about it and be more careful.)
    1
  2860. Mock the other features of this car all you like, the driver's visor not having a mirror on it is genius and should be required by law in all cars. If you're sitting in that seat, you need to be looking out of the car, not at yourself.
    1
  2861. When I was a kid in the '80s, I went a couple of times with my father to a junkyard that was about half normal junk cars and half vehicles from World War II. Deuce-and-a-half trucks, jeeps, command cars, halftracks, demilled Sherman tanks, DUKWs, you name it. The guy who ran the place bought a trainload of stuff at the end of the war, put it in the woods out back of his service station, and just sort of... left it, except for one Sherman he kept running to drive in the Fourth of July parade every year. Sadly, he died around the turn of the century, and I think I remember reading that his heirs scrapped everything in the place and sold the land to housing developers. There was a lot of pressure from the state government to close down and clean up old-school junkyards around then, anyway.
    1
  2862. Halfway through this video, I seriously thought, "Jeez, art gallery, he's lucky they didn't use picture wire."
    1
  2863. 4:58 Yeah, it's a four-barrel cluster all right.
    1
  2864. My tech brain thinks it's very clever, but possibly a little too clever for its own good. My historian brain thinks future beholders will find its weird origin story, and what that story says about geopolitical conditions at the time of its introduction, to be the most interesting thing about it... ... and my "minored in graphic design" brain thinks someone made some very poor font choices somewhere along the way, doesn't hold with these newfangled two-tone pistols, and why on Earth is the trigger red, you pretentious weirdos? :)
    1
  2865. Like that one guy with the Uzi in the famous footage of Reagan getting shot. "Where the hell did that come from?!"
    1
  2866. I don't think I've ever heard the interwar period described as a golden age before. I guess the case could be made in terms of architecture and industrial design, but not in very many other aspects of life in the western world...
    1
  2867.  @madspooks  Well, maybe. On the other hand, Prohibition, rampant crime, the Russian Civil War, the Warlord Period in China, the first Red Scare... I suspect the 1920s only roared for a relatvely small corner of the population, and we have the impressions we have of it today because the literature they left behind is the most prominent. And even some of that suggests it wasn't as good as it seemed--is anyone in The Great Gatsby happy?
    1
  2868.  @theanonymousmrgrape5911  ... as it were.
    1
  2869. "Tetanus-Fueled Treasure Hunt" would be a good name for an industrial band.
    1
  2870. Those first projectiles look uncanniily like Mk III ("Fat Man") atomic bombs, and the Fire Quest one at 10:40 bears an eerie resemblance to some of the later thermonuclear gravity bombs, though I gather from the later footage that the fins are actually the business end of that one. I'm sure it's a total coincidence, but kind of ironic given they're supposed to be "less lethal".
    1
  2871.  @mythicalducky  "Light" was US automotive industry jargon for "window" for quite a while. It comes from the building trades, where it still turns up in that sense from time to time (e.g. in terms like "skylight" for a roof window, or the descriptions of house doors that have windows in them).
    1
  2872. This reminds me of an old joke from an otherwise deeply forgettable sitcom that ran ABC in the '80s. I can't even remember what it was called, Mrs. President or some such, because the whole premise of the show was that the President of the United States was a woman. (This was considered an absurd enough concept to hang an entire sitcom on in the 1980s.) Anyway, I can't even remember why I happened to watch it one night, but this one joke has stuck with me all these years regardless. There's an episode where the First Gentleman is seriously ill with something or other, and in one scene set at the Soviet Embassy, the KGB rezident bursts into the Ambassador's office and tells him, "Comrade Ambassador! I have important news for you! The President's husband is very sick, he may die!" "Incredible!" shouts the Ambassador. "The KGB is the most effective intelligence-gathering agency in the world!" "I heard it from Ted Koppel," admits the KGB officer.
    1
  2873. "How do you lose the synchro in first?!" I had a pickup once that never had a synchro in first, but then, in that truck first wasn't really meant to be used most of the time; it was just for crawling in low-range 4WD. Probably not true of a 911. :)
    1
  2874. (Nikolas Lloyd voice) Ev-er-y-bo-dy.
    1
  2875. Dang it, I was going to call my biography of the 20th century's worst president Incompetence, Corruption, and a Rioting Mob: The Warren G. Harding Story. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
    1
  2876. The thing about oceans is that they're quite a lot more huge than that.
    1
  2877. Was that one of the special mosquito-repelling ones for porches? I vaguely remember having one of those, long ago.
    1
  2878.  @TechnologyConnections  Yeah, I don't recall it being outstandingly effective.
    1
  2879. I mean technically every Colt gun apart from the one that was their greatest hit is not Colt's greatest hit. ... I'm sorry, I'll wait in the car.
    1
  2880. Lest you think this was just PD being random, UK railways still measure track in terms of miles and chains today, in one of heavy industry's many, many cases of How It's Always Been Done.™ :)
    1
  2881. Offroading a UNIMOG must feel like being the support truck driver for a Dakar Rally team.
    1
  2882. "Large concrete blocks that look like something that would stop traffic." Funny you should say that, because that's exactly what Jersey barriers are for--NOT anchoring a stage set. Tensioned with ratchet straps, no less. (facepalm)
    1
  2883. Good grief, it's like the Chrysler / Imperial / Chrysler Imperial thing all over again. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
    1
  2884. I wonder if the author of that report was the same person who wrote the one about the Webley Mars. It has a very similar vibe. "Singularly unpleasant and alarming... No one who fired once with the pistol wished to shoot it again."
    1
  2885. I would be tempted to nominate the entire Pacific War, which was a colossal blunder on Japan's part--particularly since there's documentary evidence, in the transcripts of the Imperial Conferences held in 1940 and '41, that practically everyone responsible knew that and, after careful consideration, decided to... go ahead and do it anyway?! I suppose it could be argued that it wasn't specifically a naval own goal, since the culture of the IJA was ultimately responsible for the national policy being thus enacted, and only the execution of said disastrous policy fell to the IJN, but...
    1
  2886. Can confirm, the OG Viper is almost uncontrollable. The only reason I wasn't killed at least a hundred times driving mine is because there's no collision damage in Gran Turismo.
    1
  2887. Someone looked at a golden retriever and thought, "This should be bigger." :)
    1
  2888. In retrospect, "Discount Gas Corporation" is perhaps not a name to inspire great confidence.
    1