So we went to the lake this last weekend...quite a nice weekend for it too, great weather, not even breaking into the 90s. Of course I brought a fair share of ammunition and put my firearms through their paces. I even fired my PLR-16, which is a .223 AR-15 pistol, at night...that was a treat, quite a flash signature! Also I shot my .45 auto, which confirmed a few things from my last trip to the range. It continuously kept choking on the Remington ball ammo I was feeding it, with probably 2-3 malfunctions per clip of 7 rounds. The two forms of malfunction encountered were same as the last trip, failure to go into battery and failure to extract. I knew what to do this time and could quickly resolve these malfunctions, the first with a light tap to the back of the slide, the latter by locking the slide back, extracting the magazine, racking the slide til the casing is extracted, and reinserting the magazine. However, rereading some manuals leads me to mention a correction in a previous post:

A type II malfunction, the failure to eject or stovepipe malfunction, is not ideally corrected by racking the slide, as I wrote before (and read in a Gabe Suarez book). Because the slide catches on the casing as it is returning forward, it could be that the next round is being chambered, and racking the slide back fully could chamber another round, resulting in a much more frustrating double feed malfunction. The ideal choice here is to curl your support hand over the top of the slide, in front of the ejection port, and sweep your hand backwards, catching the half-ejected casing and pushing it (as well as the slide that is holding it) enough to release it, which will then allow the slide to finish its action and go into battery. Since you aren't racking it all the way back, you won't be in danger of a double feed.

However, I luckily haven't been hit with one of these yet, so I can't say that my method works better in practice. Actually it certainly isn't my method, it's very common...I read it in an Erik Lawrence book, but I'm sure its been around for some time.

I watched "Walk The Line" over the weekend too, and have some strong feelings about the movie. I've never been a huge fan of his music; in my opinion I think people enjoy his style, his character, and those aspects of Johnny Cash more than his music itself. Kind of the same with Bob Dylan, though his are more about the lyrics. But I'm getting off topic. I grew to hate this movie for its message. It made a feeble attempt at justifying Cash's abandonment of his wife, and somehow tried to make his adulterous pursuit of another married (off and on) woman seem "romantic". It may be true to life, and I'm not condemning Cash here, but I'm disgusted how the movie portrays him as cool/admirable/etc. As Sam Miles would say, he was a "butt sniffer". Totally without character or integrity, totally given to whatever he felt he wanted at the time. It is very popular to justify infidelity and divorce with feelings and emotions...his wife "didn't support him or share his dreams", they were emotionally distant, they fell out of love, he and June were soulmates, all that BS. Just like John Lennon and Cynthia Lennon...one reason I never had much respect for Lennon, as an individual (though he had a wicked wit and and amazing musical gift). I've heard this movie defended in that their marriage was "over" by the time he pursued June, but that's respectfully a load of bollocks. A good half of the movie, spanning years, represents the time in which he is chasing one particular skirt and neglecting and dishonoring his wife, still very much married to him and still very much wanting him to be back with her. And all through the movie, they documented countless times when Vivian would desperately work to revive or repair their marriage, but I can't think of any drop of effort made by Cash to make it work.

I feel bad, because I'm not meaning to rag on Cash personally, despite the factual or unfactual nature of the movie, but its more the movie itself and the way it is popularly received that bothers me...that people look with such a flippant eye at the slow degradation of a marriage, the ounce-by-ounce betrayal that is painfully, horribly detailed and documented in this movie. It isn't a love story at all. They at least portrayed June in a more positive light, in that she resisted his advances for a long time and recognized how wrong it was. But like I said, the movie is painful to watch because "romance" is overshadowed and sullied by the terrible slow starvation and death of his first marriage, due to neglect and betrayal. The fact that this is so quickly glossed over and ignored by fans of the movie is what bothers me, that people can easily justify the dissolution of a marriage and the vows that come with it if it just starts to "not feel right" or if something better comes along. The moment you say "I do", you've picked your soulmate, and whoever else comes along, they aren't for you. And did anyone else notice how the Cash character was always doing this kind of lecherous leering thing towards the Carter character?
OK, I'll stop with the crotchety old man thing. It's just one of those things...why do you think 50% of marriages end in divorce? People say it is better to divorce than to lead an unhappy life. I kind of doubt people who try to lead lives of integrity and make every effort to honour their vows to their spouses end up all that unhappy as compared to the people who fly from relationship to relationship down a road paved with infidelity, divorce, and broken promises in pursuit of "happiness". But what do I know, I'm just a 20-something.

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Besides, I prefer comedy. Like a romance between Johnny Cash and Jimmy Carter. Think of the giant swimming rabbit jokes that could be made! Oh and that wasn't so much a gay joke as a Jimmy Carter joke, so no offence, pooftas.

Another St. Crispin's dinner is in the works, for August. Perhaps I'll put up a menu, although as our invitees grow more numerous, my dining room is not getting any bigger, so I'm not sure how to handle that, exactly. But so far we've got dishes from Wales and Cheshire for this time. Don't have a deep fryer yet (yet being an operative word) so we'll have to wait a bit longer for fish and chips and Scotch eggs (aka cholesterol cluster bombs, arterial bunker busters, etc).