Have you seen the prices some of the weird shit gets online? INSANITY.
So Monday, I discovered that Dave Brockie, AKA Oderus Urungus, died. That’s pretty fucking harsh, man. This isn’t like the day I found out Ozzy Osbourne died – hell, we all expected him to die in my lifetime*. But this was one of my teenage idols. A guy who fronted a band that made the most fucked up music of the time, and put on one hell of a show. I caught them in… ugh. Memory fails. Laguna? Irvine? Back in my late teens. One of the first live shows I ever saw, and it blew my mind. GWAR’s influence on my comics is evident to my long-time fans – FLEM has a huge GWAR touch to it, and I always understood the message GWAR and Green Jello (fuck the trademark litigation) and other bands put out – make art that fucks with people. Give them dick jokes and heavier concepts to mull. Piss blood on your fans, but do it in a way they appreciate.
This one is for you, ya sick, wonderful fucker.
*yes, I know Ozzy ain’t dead yet. How weird is that?
yeah that oddball ammo is up there.. a few years back I thought “hey, let’s get great-grandad’s smoke-poles out and make ’em bark”..then I priced .50-70 government for the 1866 trapdoors….and they went back into the closet. sure, I could buy the long cases, trim them down, and load them myself but..too much damn work for something I’d probably fire a few times and put away again.
I on the other hand, will not have a weapon without firing it at least once, and keeping some of the ammo to use it- Or at least dies, brass and a bullet mould along with some load data.
But I don’t own anything so valuable a scratched stock would be a financial catastrophe either.
Exactly! Not firing a weapon you own at least once (and assuming that it is safe to fire) is disrespectful to the maker and is a mortal sin.
I great-grandfather fired them in cuba during the spanish-american war. I don’t think they’ve been fired since. the cost of having it gone over, plus a few rounds of ammo was like 3-4 months pay..last I looked..sorry, but all 3 of them will have to sit in the closet for a while (they won’t fit in the safe!)
Anytime I hear that there’s a couple rounds of ammo worth a month’s pay or more, I start wondering why some brilliant entrepreneur isn’t manufacturing it in limited quantities…
Someone is. Just not enough someones to crash the price.
Allen, Track of the Wolf has new Starline brass for $1.20/piece, no minimum buy. A Lee mould is $20.00.
Find your local re-enactor types, one or more will be a competent smith. Take them in on the pretext of an assessment for insurance, the smith will not be able to resist looking to see if it’s operable.
*REGARDLESS: DO get them photographed, assessed and documented for insurance… They may belong in a vault, not a closet!
As someone that finds reloading fun… I honestly wouldn’t mind creating a company for oddball size components and tooling… But there’s a real problem with finding information, the dimensions and load numbers *must* be sitting somewhere, but where?
I ran into the same kind of problem trying to find blueprints of nearly anything, even things built in the 1930’s.
Damn. I’d never listened to, and of course never seen, GWAR. “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got ’till it’s gone…” Hell of a time to become a GWAR fan.
I think the continued existence of people like Ozzy Osbourne and Keith Richards are attributable to this sort of drug singularity. Once you achieve a certain, precise amount of specific narcotics in your bloodstream they fuse with your cells and render you effectively immortal. Side effects include excessive mumbling and looking like you’re a walking corpse.
You really might not be all that far off.
I love when sheer online bullshitting turns out to have some basis in reality.
I think we can probably add Hunter S. Thompson to that list; he hit 67 apparently without suffering any adverse effects from what, to all appearances, was a life of some pretty hard partying. He had a number of health conditions and ultimately committed suicide as a way out of chronic, permanent, intractable pain. “Too weird to live, too fast to die” indeed.
Ozzy and Keith are mostly braindead though. Lemmy’s brain on the other hand seems to be still functioning.
As far as old ammo goes, the most experience I have is with .303, which is a ghost these days so I’ve taken to just reloading it.
Speaking of which, years upon years ago my grandfather had an SMLE rifle that was gold-inlaid with a carving in the stock that depicted a bear catching a salmon, and decorative carvings down the barrel and fore end. To this day it is the most beautiful rifle I have ever seen in my life. Eventually he passed away, and his wife (my grandmother) was, sadly, not far behind him. So while going through his will, and trying to figure out where everything should go (I don’t have a large family so everyone was being greedy fucks) the topic came up of the decorative rifle. It was not listed in the will of either party and eventually we decided to leave it be, hanging in its place on the wall. We all went home, and came back the next day, and the rifle was missing, but nothing else was out of place. The door and all windows were even locked. But none of us ever saw it again. It’s a bit of a cynical running joke that ol’ grandad came back from the dead and took it with him.
But it’s strange- Their property was a number of miles into the woods along a number of dirt trails, on a private 2000-acre deer lease. The drivable roads leading up to the main building are almost maze-like and I highly doubt any random person would be able to navigate it one day and leave.
The only people alive who knew the rifle existed were myself, my parents (who obviously don’t have it because I was living with them at the time) and an uncle who wasn’t interested in any of it because he had a different father.
Interesting to think about sometimes.
Last time I priced .303 (about 4 days ago) that stuffs up around $1.25 a bullet. I probably should just start reloading.
Saw GWAR at Dragon*Con somewhere between 94-97, they (and their fans) were “different” to say the least!
Got a friend who specializes in finding the most out of date, stupidly obscure rifles and handguns and manufacturing rounds for them. shits crazy man.
I think my favorite is his swiss vetterli in 10.4×38Rmm, which was a rim fire cartridge. he converted the bolt to centerfire, and resizes 8×50mmR Lebel brass to fit it.
he always lets me shoot it, its just an amazing gun to fire, low recoil because its HUGE on length, and hard hitting cuz the bullet has to be in excess of 300 or so grains, its just BIG.
Hope my previous comment wasn’t a spoiler. 😉
I have seen GWAR 5 or 6 times live – it is always one hell of a show.
It’s also fun to come out the show looking like you murdered someone with all the stage blood being thrown around. Never wear something that cannot be washed after the show.
They also always had the friendliest mosh pits. I got hurt at each show, but if you ever ended on the floor, you had 2 or 3 hands trying to get you back up and into in the love.
GunBroker currently lists a single auction for a pair of boxes of .357 Max at $83. There’s also someone selling a single bullet of it for $99, which is just WTF.
Check to make sure those aren’t empty boxes, at those rates?
I like to shoot .416 Rigby, and that stuff runs $120 for a box of 20, if you can find it.
So Mick tried to shove this maximum round into his ‘Sweet Thing’ and it was too ‘long’?
Where’s Alex when you need her to put in an inappropriate joke?!?!
Damn, those 200 pieces of new Max brass in the basement have done better than gold over the last dozen-odd years. Interwebpipethingy being what is, even the repeatedly reloaded stuff I shoot is prolly worth some insane amount. But then what would I shoot‽
Magnums? Special?
It ain’t just max you can use.
Naturally but every so often, nothing beats using Dan’s Cannon the way it was intended.
never saw much of GWAR, but I enjoyed it thoroughly when they fed Jerry Springer to the World Maggot.
So, what’s his “Sweet thing” revolver? have we seen it before? will we see it?
Please tell me it’s either a python or a M27/28 revolver.
It was first mentioned back in Aftermath 2, but I don’t think we’ve actually seen it. In fact, I don’t think it’s been mentioned since then, and I don’t recall any trips to the Casting Couch with a .357 other than Joe’s LCR.
$280 is wealthy?