In Case of Blizzard, Keep Calm and Shovel On

The local TV stations are predicting that we’re going to get hammered with snow and wind, maybe 7 or 10 or 31 inches of the white stuff in 40 or 50 or 70 knot winds. The reporters are reporting this with the sort of glee that sportscasters everywhere but New England have lavished on Tom Brady’s undersized balls lately.

Now, this may be nothing much. After all, a big storm is to local TV what a missing plane is to CNN, or a lost blonde somewhere to Fox News: an excuse to cover it like the NSA monitors on Eric Holder’s enemies list. So some percentage of the storm predictions are simply wishful thinking by TV newspeople, the kind of dysfunctional humans who might set kittens on fire for the entertainment value of watching them burn. We looked at the aviation weather forecast and it looks like a bad-end-of-normal winter storm to us.

For the love of Mike, that’s what happens in wintertime: it gets cold, and precipitation comes down in the solid state of matter, to wit, snow. You’d think snow had never fallen this side of Narsarssuaq before, from the caterwauling and carrying on in the media.

But Here’s Something to Read if We Get Snuked¹

But what if we do get snuked, and wind up off the air? How will you ever fill your blog-reading hours? Well, we have a few posts that will post on schedule. And in addition to those, we can send you over to this massive index post at The Firearm Blog:

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/01/23/shot-show-complete-round-posts-show/

In which, they link to all one-hundred-sixty-nine of TFB’s SHOT Show posts. Now, they run the gamut from stuff we’re kind of interested again to yawn-another-AR to things that make you just go, “Huh?” (Like the fact that you can have an artificially-distressed finish put on your gun to conceal the fact you’re a total poser. Yes, really). But no matter who you are, you’ll find something you like. We liked the Colt 1918 Self-Loading Rifle, a license-production Ohio Ordnance BAR with Colt markings and a deep, rich blue finish. We didn’t like the price tag quite so much ($8,799) but we reckon the entire batch will sell. (That means 1,000, netting Colt a topline of nearly $9 million, a lot of which will stick to retailer and jobber fingers).

If your taste runs more in the Teutonic direction, then Ian McCollum, familiar from his Forgotten Weapons home base but wearing his TFB hat for this report, tells us that new MP-44s and MP-38s are really, no kidding, no fooling, coming from Germany to the USA, and they’ve already cleared the significant hurdle of ATF tech approval for import. (Of course, it’s not as if their word, even in writing, means anything, as their volte-face on the SIG brace shows). Anyway, here’s the MP-38. Just looking at it gives us an urge to storm Eben Emael.

Now, not everyone gets the jones for foreign and obsolete hardware like we do. Some people want only the trendiest and most mod-ly. We got that covered. While ARs are kind of dull these days, not in .338LM (8.6 x 70) they’re not. Meet Ulfbehrt.

Yes, he’s named for the Viking sword marking we’ve discussed here before, the meaning of which is not documented, but only speculated upon. As we wrote in 2013:

No one knows who, or what, Ulfbehrt was. The name does not exist in surviving documents at all. Was it a man’s name? Perhaps not, as swords with the name were made for some 200 years. The name of a lost god? A name for the product, an early trademark? No-one knows.

There are so many mods to this Alexander Arms design, it looks closer to a Barrett than to an AR in some ways — which is fitting because of the .338 LM’s almost .50-like ballistics. But internally it’s not an AR at all — it’s more like a Degtyaryev machine gun in its flap locking system (There were a lot of them: DP-28, DA, DT, RP-48, DShK, RPD, and we’re probably forgetting a few). It just shows that the ergonomics battle is over, and the AR stands triumphant.

As these three posts show, there’s something for everyone there. There are not only more photos and information at each of those articles, there’s still the other 166 to look at.

We’ll be Back, That Is, If We Go Away at All

We survived the Blizzard of ’78 (a friend of our cousin got out his show car and went around pulling people out of snowbanks. We should probably mention that Charlie’s show car was an M3 halftrack). Indeed, we drove home from work in the Blizzard, in a 1969 Pontiac Catalina with a huge engine, a two-speed slushbox automatic, and skinny bias-ply tires, which is how most people rolled in those years before SUVs were a thing, and when Toyotas had paint the faded the first year and fenders that were a fine filigree of rust by the third, and most Hondas came with only two wheels.

So we’re fully expecting to survive this one. Our power, maybe not. Blogbrother installed an automatic generator this year so we may all wind up surfing his couches for a couple of days, if the news stations get their wish and the storm is a real disaster.

Notes

1. “Snuked” — nuked by snow. Yes, we totally made that up.