Donward

I wish I could. I think the actual tactics used has very limited value. Real bullets go through most stuff on a paintball field. Plus the guns have limited range. What is of use is the cardiovascular exercise combined with being able to make decisions quickly, move and function while cooperating with friends/strangers in a hectic environment is useful. I've always been good at getting my guys to do simple, rudimentary plans that factor in the team's abilities. The speedball guys essentially use swat team tactics, stacked and bunched up, and are generally overly aggressive and confident in their superior firepower. A simple skirmish line with a refused flank coupled with a flanking charge wipes those guys out.

Paintball is great fun and I wish I had the time to do it again. I prefer woodsball as I feel it provides a more realistic battlefield. The kiddies with the fancy doodads prefer speedball courses which is where all the endorsements happen. The latter is all about rate of fire and stacking. I have wrecked speedball teams at woodsball leading random scrubs with field guns because speedball guys aren't used to random terrain.

Nectarine > Peach. Olives are a fruit and are used for mixed drinks.

Watermelon. Needed for consumption. 1 sharp-ish knife at least six inches in length. Cut into lengthwise quarters. Place red part to food hole. Consume red part. Remember to spit out seeds. Stop when you reach white/green part. Grapefruit. Needed for consumption. 1 knife. 1 spoon. One saucer or bowl. Sweetener such as sugar. Cut grapefruit in half around the fruit's equator. Use knife to cut multiple (16-24) incisions inside the grapefruit to separate the fruit wedge bits from the tough wedge membrane. Then use the knife to cut around the orbit of the fruit separating it from the tough skin. Place on saucer or bowl. Sprinkle with sugar. Repeat on other grapefruit hemisphere. Use spoon to dig out the wedge fruit carefully without squirting you or your neighbor with juice. After fruit is consumed, use the grapefruit skin as a bowl to drink the remaining grapefruit juice. Remember not to eat seeds which are called "pips".

Being the sultan surrounded by his harem? Or being one of the eunuch soldiers sent off to fight in Austria and the Orient?

That is no more a pistol than this is a rifle When the legal definitions are wrong and don't match reality, it's time to change those definitions.

I seem to recall that in World War 1, the French government encouraging soldiers on leave to knock up their wives, lovers or whomever in order to balance the population decline. And I just wanted to write that one-liner about the Ottomans. You honestly don't think I have something serious to add to this discussion at this juncture?

Welp, time to go back to polygamy, serfdom, castration and eunuch soldiers. Seems the Ottomans and Mamlukes had it right after all.

Ouch. That spelling... I enjoyed listening to Richard Hoagland on the Art Bell Show back in the 1990s. I have chronic insomnia and I've always treated Coast-to-Coast as fun sci-fi entertainment, particularly when they talked about Bigfoot, scary ghost stories, Chupacabra and the one lady who described in rather lurid detail her romance with a lizard men. They're cold-blooded... The bullshit starting get a bit thick when Hoagland - if I'm remembering correctly - made some rather dumb predictions about the Hale-Bopp comet.

Toxn, you a really going to start an apple war with someone who has grown up in Washington? The only reason green apples (presumably Granny Smith) taste "better" is because you're only getting nasty, mushy red delicious apples that have spent two years in a nitrogen filled warehouse. There are so many different varieties of red apples that there's no contest. Given the choice, I'll take pears over apples.

Red apples > Green apples. That is all.

Now if he wrote and edited Machiavelli's "The Prince" for kids, that would be a different matter

OK. Color me a Fudd but I don't get AR "pistols" and this whole nonsense over the Sig "brace". I know there's a bunch of crap with the ATF and defining what-is-what so it fits inside a nice category that is easy to tax and regulate for government bureaucrats. But to me, this isn't a "pistol". You can call it a carbine, or a semi-automatic "submachine gun" (contradictory term, I know), or Personal Defense Weapon or whatever but that isn't a pistol. You wouldn't carry it as a pistol. You wouldn't holster it like a pistol. And you wouldn't even really fire it as a pistol. Let's be real here. So why is it supposedly billed as a pistol? That's setting aside why anyone would want one and why you'd want to fire a shortened rifle one-handed. Unless you're Steve McQueen shooting a Mare's Leg, it just looks stupid. That Winchester holds, what? Three rounds? So ergonomic and practical. Just what the modern "hunter" needs!

Hmmm. I see my first posting endeavor struck out. Of course now I'm wondering if that whackjob John du Pont had an M59 or an M113 that he tooled around in or whether the movie producers were being accurate using that vehicle or if they couldn't find an M113. It's an answer that I'm not particularly curious to find the answer to...

Our Buff Orphington roosters were gregarious and brave, sacrificing themselves to protect their hens from hawks, eagles and coyotes. Sadly, one died after being ganged up on by a few of the aforementioned Wyondott cockerels. Another sacrificed himself fighting off a coyote. The hens weren't terribly intelligent, admittedly. As another animal story, our farm cat Tom (not the most original name for a black tomcat) would help us herd the chickens into the chicken yard at the end of the day because he knew that the sooner that job was done, the sooner he'd get to go into the house for milk and warmth.

I am not qualified to speak about the M113 Gavin. But given its renown as an Internet superstar, I feel this is the proper way to disseminate information about American's premier armored personnel carrier. I start by sharing that for some reason, appears in the upcoming homoerotic wrestling movie "Foxcatcher". I honestly don't know why folks would actually want to watch this movie but it does reek heavily of Oscar bait.

My family has "the dog couch" too. If only because if we didn't, we'd have a 180 pound Irish wolfhound(s) sitting in our laps.

My family raised chickens, about 80 at one point. The Buff Orphingtons, Black Sexlinks, and Barred Plymouth Rocks had generally mild dispositions. The Silver-laced Wyandotts were murderous rapists whom we quickly "retired". Since we raised them from chicks, a handful of them developed decent personalities, including one Black Sexlink who bonded to my little brother. Her name was simply "James' Chicken" and she'd knock on the back door of our house so she could lay her egg each morning in the laundry room. She loved to be picked up and petted, particularly by my little brother. The funny thing is she was a jealous woman and whenever James picked up another chicken, she'd beat the bird up once he set it down. At the end of the day, she was still just a chicken but I'd like to think that she had a little proto-soul and she was certainly more human than many bipedal individuals I've met.

I'm not sure how that nutter chicken scratch pertains to Clausewitz.

I own that book. It was in one of those give a book, take a book piles. It is rather fantastical with implausible theories covering a dozen or so scenarios. It's in my "two move" boxes of books that are lingering at my folks' place as we pare down stuff at my new place. If I recall, the most plausible one was if the Japanese had foregone the sneak-attack on Pearl Harbor and engaged the American Fleet as it steamed east to relieve the Phillipines, sinking the American battle fleet in the open sea where they'd be irrecoverable.

I can be the "expert" with bad hair and dubious acedemic credentials who sets up applied experiments that don't apply to the actual situation. In other words I can shoot toy tanks with my 30-30 to show penetration values.

Nonsense. When Robert Heinlein died, his body became FOOD and we ate him.

As a reminder, Audie Murphy wasn't big, rough and tough enough for the Marine Corp.

Notice how America lost interest in space travel when it became readily apparent that there weren't buxom alien women waiting for wholesome, square-jawed American men to find them? Let's bring the romance back into space! But for schnerious, there has been a ton of cool stuff with Mars of late and it's a lot more interesting than race riots, Islamic terrorists and Bill Cosby filling up the news cycle here on Earth.

From the boys with the slide rules at NASA. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4413