Damn your Heiney!

Apparently James Bond is going to be drinking beer in the new movie. Apparently, like everything, this is an outrage, which is strange. It used to be that a woman had to get raped and murdered for an outrage to occur and that came to be because the words "raped and murdered" were too vulgar for polite consumption (the same goes for "white slavery" because no white person wants their poor women to be equated with the half-breeds and such that "prostitute" themselves. I mean, perish the thought).

It's absurd. James Bond has been a tool of corporate consumption since he was first incepted. That's almost the entire point of the guy. He's a violent, glamorous ad exec that saves the world. He's Don Draper with an accent and he always has been. To make a poo-poo out of what he drinks is ridiculous.

Even if this was an issue-- and it is because Heineken is a crap beer and what kind of an upper class gent would drink that swill?-- I don't really care because Skyfall is looking to be a good movie. It's got a solid director and more quality actors than you can shake a stick at.

What's more is I believe it is going to be good because of the video below. Look at that gal. She isn't blinking. That's significant. That means somebody put the care and effort into this movie's action. I just watched an action movie (the name of which I cannot remember, sorry) and whenever the characters fired they started blinking. You almost have to when you fire a gun, that's a natural response. Take note of that. The next time you watch a movie go ahead and see whether the actors blink when they fire a gun or not. You'd be surprised how often it happens.

It's maddening.

It takes effort and attention to detail to get over the fact that you're holding an explosion and it is pretty near your face. It takes training. It looks like maybe they took the time and the effort (and the money) to breed that out of this woman.

Watch this--

This is going to be a good one. . . unlike that piece of shit Quantum of Solace. What the fuck was that thing?

I'm Afraid of American Vampires

If you like comic books of a pleasing nature then you should already be buying American Vampire. I mean, if you're not, what are you, some sort of an idiot? It's got everything: Compelling characters, gross amounts of elaborate gore, cowboys, Stephen King, a loving rendition of recent American history, and wonderful art. Just because I liberated my first hardback from Borders when they were closing doesn't mean you

With all of that said, I just bought the third trade paperback. My local comic book store didn't have the second one in stock and not only did I not feel like waiting to buy them in order, the third volume is about Nazi vampires and Japanese vampire bio-organic weapons.

It's a great book, all told. There is a certain amount of spit in my eye, though, and I keep coming back to it. It is plaguing me.

I've found two glaring historical inaccuracies in the book. Naturally, they were about booze and guns.

INACCURATE FACT NUMBER ONE--
The mai tai is mentioned in the first arc. The mai tai was not invented officially (or named the "mai tai") until the 1950's when tiki themed bars were as common as people with jobs and crippling diet pill addiction.

INACCURATE FACT NUMBER TWO--
2) One fellow is clearly using a Colt Python. While one of the coolest and most iconic handguns ever to exist, the Colt Python was not minted until, again, the mid-1950's, when handguns were as common as people with jobs and airplane pilots' mistresses.

Also, the book is about vampires and everybody knows the last vampires were killed by the Vatican's secret army in the mid 17th-century and those who were no vanquished fled to Outer Thule to bide their time and dream of the day when man would fear them once again.

Maybe the aesthetic he was going for was one slightly ahead of the times. Lord knows that's a common thing to do, especially in books that are as steeped in science fiction and fantasy as a book about the legacy of fucking vampires in the goddamn United States. Metal Gear Solid 3 had its hover chairs, so why not let American V-pire (as we all call it down at the comic mine) have its anachronistic booze and Dirty Harry guns?

Oh, also a helicopter appears in the book to save the day, but I'll let that one go, because what kind of a nerd gives a good goddamn about the history of helicopters?

And, now to consecrate my love of this book, of blood suckers, and of David Bowie references apropos of nothing, here is the opening of The Hunger-- which is perhaps the bluest movie of the time.

One More Gun Before I Go

I like collecting images and stories of bizarre weaponry, especially guns. The Marklin Rifle is one thing, but there's a whole bevy of strange guns that are just out there existing between the memories of more famous guns like the Winchester or the Lee-Enfield or the Maxim Gun or the AK47. They're all there, just waiting for you to find them. That's one of the reasons I like this Western (or one of the Westerns) I am working on. The Old West and that whole time period is this very unique transition period between what firearms were and what they were going to become. The thing is-- what makes it so much fun-- is that at the time nobody knew what was the formula that was going to work. It's like this Cambrian Era of flourishing life and diversity right before a meteor hit the earth or something (in this case, that Extinction Event would probably be World War I).

Anyways, here's a bunch of guns. Enjoy.

The Marklin Rifle

Frederick Selous (left) with his Marklin Rifle (right).

The Marklin (or the Märklin, as my keyboard stubbornly refuses to spell out for me) was made famous by the Norwegian crime fiction writer Jo Nesbo in his book The Redbreast. In the novel Nesbo featured this weapon not as a hunter's rifle, but as the weapon of an assassin. Since then it's come into some prominence among his fans and among some amateur gun enthusiasts and people who just generally wonder, what the heck is this wonder rifle?

A brief search on the internet shows that therer is a lot of hearsay and what-have-you regarding the rifle and whether or not it actually exists. Unfortunately, the internet has far more bad information about the rifle and it's unusual history than it does accurate information.

This whole business reminds me of something I read about when I was reading up on the William Shakespeare and the conspiracy theory that he did not actually write his own plays (which, you'll trust me on this one, is an actual belief that some people adhere to, which, to me, just goes to show that sometimes all it takes to fool a smart person is another smart person). One of the counter-arguments to this theory is truly one of the most elegant things I have ever read. The counter-argument claims that that the absence of evidence does not necessarily mean the evidence of absence. Just because you can't find something doesn't mean it didn't happen, and just because you can't prove something that does not mean that it is suddenly and irrecoverably dispelled.

Or that's the reading I take from that whole business.

Much of the problem with the rifle has to do with the fact that it shares its name with a toy manufacturer. A lot of googling and yahooing and binging (haha, let's not kid ourselves) turns up nothing but toy cannons and trains or whatever else, which murks the water. At that point I know a lot of people give up, I know I almost did, but I can assure you, the Marklin Rifle is a very real weapon. There's more than a few elephants and men hanging out in the afterlife who will tell you the same (I mean, you know, if you speak elephant).

The Marklin was in fact designed around the turn of the century by a cannon manufacturer looking to branch out in sport shooting. Using the same falling block action design as the famous British Martini-Henry Rifle (with a significant scaling, naturally), the was very much a rifle in keeping with the late 19th century-- at least in terms of upscale hunting rifles. While it was hardly groundbreaking, it was a fairly unique weapon.

The problem with the Marklin wasn't that it was a just boutique weapon (which it was) or that it had a unique caliber (which being a 16mm makes it bizarre even among elephant guns) or that it was a falling block weapon in the age where bolt-action rifles were becoming popular-- it was all of these things. The Marklin Rifle hit the market too little and too late. The little cannon maker that could soon folded up its small arms division after only selling a small number of the weapons in the last decades of the 19th century.

In no time at all, the rifle was overshadowed by cheaper weapons with less fussy maintainance routines and less expensive ammunition. Why spend that many krones or marks or pounds or whatever when you could buy maybe two high-end rifles for the same price? Maybe if the rifle found a base of customers it could have driven down the price and really made something of it, but that only exists where some sort of jonbar hinge dropped in and made this finicky rifle something more than it was. That world doesn't exist, obviously and all we're left with is a story-- unless you're an antique arms collector.

If you ask Jo Nesbo, the real market with the Marklin rifle is exclusively Neo-Nazi psychopaths (a redundancy if there ever was one), so maybe it's for the best this rifle never took off.

Nesbo also mentions that the Marklin used a special type of bullet (beyond using a 16,, shell). Nesbo's assertion that it uses "Singapore bullets" is true, with some minor liberties. The Marklin's 16mm bullets used "Dum Dum" rounds, which is a kind of a ball designed to expand upon impact and create larger, uglier, and rougher wounds. Dum Dum bullets are so named from a factory in the Indian town of Dum Dum that produced soft-leaded bullets that were the predecessors to our modern hollow point bullets. This is one of the main reasons the Marklin is thought of as such a bizarre weapon. While one can chamber any firearm with soft-lead very few are designed to chamber that sort of shell exclusively.

This is one of the main reasons the Marklin was destined to become nothing more than a curio-- a stillborn one at that. The 1868 Declaration of St. Petersburg put an international ban on expanding bullets over a certain weight and the 1899 Hague Convention, reinforced the taboo on the sort of bullet that the Marklin was built for. In effect, these two treatises banned the 16mm bullets the Marklin required for use against God's largest and ugliest animals (man rarely being one and often the other).

Considering this, it isn't likely the Marklin ever saw much action in battle. The prohibitive price, strange ammunition, and general illegality likely kept it out of all but the most desperate hands. Besides, even back during the Second Boer War where it might have seen combat, it would be worth more as a collectible than as an instrument of war.

With all that said, anyone who thinks that the Marklin isn't real, I'd suggest they do an actual cursory search and then write about what they find instead of just giving up when they don't hit pay dirt. Unfortunately there's a lot of that sort of thing going on in the world. People read the first thing they see and they just believe it at its word. Oh well, at least it gives me a chance to talk about guns and crime books and in the end, isn't that what it's all about?

Sources:
Anthony North, Ian V. Hog, (2004). Book of Guns and Gunsmiths, 2004. Quantum Books. p. 256
Arthur Augustus Thurlow Cunynghame, M. Balkind, (1880). My Command in South Africa, 1874-1878. Macmillan & Co.. p. 79.
Kirton, Jonathan: The British Falling Block Breechloading Rifle From 1865 (1997), p. 97

It's a Good Day For Pointless Videos

What if somebody filmed a slow motion video. . . in slow motion? Whooooooooooa. I don't think I could handle that.