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Sturgeon's House

Brick Fight

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Everything posted by Brick Fight

  1. Please send me a list of your guns and I will name them. Then your children.
  2. I dated a girl in college who had the worst allergy to dogs. She spent the night in a house where a dog once used to live, and she woke up in the middle of the night scrambling for her epi-pen as her airways closed. It always sucked because we live in one of those got-danged Librul College Towns where people wanted to bring their dogs everywhere, so we always had to check. So, I say just let them play outside, check before you bring them to a gathering, etc.
  3. We had a rush job at the PA Military Museum, though not in the traditional sense. The last known un-altered M1917 is in the museum. When they did a WW1 exhibit, they put concrete all over it to make it look like mud. Once the new curator came in, he had it pulled immediately since he had the sense to realize it was corroding the steel on it. They did a good job of fixing and painting it.
  4. God damn, I knew I wouldn't like that answer. PA used to be a great place for C&R. My dad found this old beautiful Ithaca pump for like $30, and I'm an idiot who passed on a surplus M1 carbine in pristine condition for $200. You could still buy Enfields for <$100 here until a few years ago, too. The prices have been getting in line with the rest of the country recently, with stuff I've seen at gun stores for the past ten years suddenly going up a few hundred for no real reason. It's why I'm getting intense over getting a MAS 49 and a Garand before they get more expensive than I'm willing to pay. These are weird dudes, for sure. I was able to snag all kinds of cool Russian stuff from "patriotic" dealers who are probably now kicking themselves for practically throwing Mosins and SKSes at people for super low prices. The one guy in our town I bought the Enfield from is infuriating, as he's one of those dudes that bought up loads and loads of surplus in the '90s and is sitting on a stockpile of interesting C&R that he's putting forth no effort to maintain. He just sits at his computer and brags about all of his stuff and refuses to sell it, as some wonderful old guns look more and more like shit every year. He once showed me just a huge footlocker full of Springfield 1903 barrels still in cosmoline that he won't sell until the prices rocket.
  5. Yeah, they even admitted the recordings weren't the best, too. I had guessed the MP5 one was an AR-15 coming home, too. Then I heard the last one and was positive. ARs definitely have more "oomph" in the return noise than a lot of rifle cocking.
  6. I am going to take this picture into the bathroom. Do not knock.
  7. Definitely. The first two years of doing this was a nightmare, because we weren't able to get as much product to keep up with demand (besides people throwing a hiss at us because we weren't doing ground beef/iceberg/crunchy tortilla tacos). So, we'd have to get heavy on the salsa or veggies. Greens and especially local seasonal lettuce was a godsend. Surprising amount of flavor, good texture. It really helped out in those years. This is when we would try to make a pork shoulder last the week. As far as buying locally goes, it's going to happen more, but it'll still be niche. There are too many things that happen in the average American restaurant that prevent it. A few examples: -Lack of menu flexibility. We have a small menu of one type of taco, tamale, guacamole, and two drinks that we change weekly. This lets us buy up stuff according to what we can get from farmers, then supplement it from a quality purveyor or two. Many restaurants still run the same menu year after year, so they can't work easily with the limits of seasonal product. -The hierarchy of restaurants is still shit. Opening a restaurant in the US is still shit. It costs a ridiculous amount of money, so the average person who opens one is either well-off (so with no restaurant experience), or has accepted money in private investments or bank loans (or in one case I worked at, straight-up loan sharks). This means the owner is either used to a rich lifestyle and cares more about production to have to worry about haggling prices, weekly/daily menus, inconsistent supply, etc. The latter type is the biggest problem because each investor wants their money back ASAP and to run the restaurant their way (I did short work for two restaurants that went down this way). -It's lots of effort for a low amount of product. Just getting farmers to agree to the system we've worked has taken a long time. Most of them didn't want to do it, but we built up enough of a rapport that they prefer it, now. No kitchen with a chef that works 80 hours a week trying to serve Midwesternian portion sizes can keep up with how much of a pain this can be. I think the big trend will be seasonal openings. The biggest trigger I see for failed restaurants is the Slow Season and the insistence to stay open. There are just more advantages to closing for some of the year than being open the entire year. I respect Top Chef because they run it well, Tom Calicchio is no-bullshit (especially since he supposedly got rid of that one asshole British judge nobody could stand, even though he was a producer's delight). And I also realize it's mostly about high-falutin' food and not a great representation of the industry, and they don't make it seem like anything else. I don't give a walk-in fuck about aeolis and coulis these days, so it doesn't appeal to me, but I appreciate that they reward talent and drive more than they reward entertaining guests. The rest, I can't get into. I can at least appreciate Hell's Kitchen because they intentionally take the worst kinds of cooks and chefs on there just to be yelled at for being useless. Bread is the first obvious choice. We share kitchen space with a fantastic bakery that does everything old style, perfectly fermented dough and everything. Just slapping some leftover queso fresco, beans, and avocado on a slice of their bread beats out half the meals I've eaten in my lifetime. Doesn't even need to be a sandwich. Cube some bread, throw in some cheese, and meat/veggies, some oil and vinegar, and you're good. Good bread has been denied to the average American for about 60 years now, and most won't even know it. If you can find a good bakery nearby or are willing to make your own, then you'd be surprised, especially if you're working with cheese. For cleanup, work clean. It's the best advice I can give to anyone who wants to cook. I used to work a 13 hour hotel cooking job and any time I was getting overwhelmed or behind, one of the senior cooks who was like an uncle to me, would grab me, point at my station, and say "That's what your mind looks like." "Working Clean" is a big thing that makes cooking so much less of a hassle. Limit your work to a small zone. If an NYC cook can make 150 meals working in a closet-sized nightmare every night, you can make dinner for two on a cutting board-sized area of your counter. Clean as you work. Cut your onions, put them in a bowl, clean your station. Cut your garlic, put it in a small bowl, clean your station. The more you do now while you're working, the less mess later. If you're doing everything right, then the only dirty things you'll have are some modestly-stained dishes in the sink when you're ready to serve what you made. I'd rather spend an extra two seconds putting a few extra small plates into a dishwasher than spend all night dreading cleaning every inch of a kitchen after a meal.
  8. I'm not a big steak guy, but I like Del Monicos and ribeyes the most.
  9. I cook for a living which is why I don't have the impressive militaria/machine knowledge you folks have. I've worked as chef and cook for several different types of kitchens, and although it can be pretty hot, long, and thankless work, I get off a little on being able to create something the way I do. I currently run a food truck with my friend, and we make Mexican food in as an authentic way as we can. After years of the faux-French cooking prevalent in American kitchens, it's been fun, yet difficult to start doing things like soaking & grinding corn for tortillas/tamales, or making our own cheese and sour cream from scratch. Current project is to make our own goat chevre from goat milk. I've also found myself tearing down preconceptions in my mind of what seems to be commonly-held "knowledge" in the culinary world. The big one lately has been produce prices. While it's convenient and supposedly cheaper to have a food proprieter deliver produce for you on a reliable schedule, we've been having an easy time of getting produce from the market where we work. Most people look at the retail prices of farmers' market prices here and wonder how we can buy the stuff and get away with it. After dealing the farmers long enough, we found that whatever they can't sell at a market has to go for wholesale at auctions later. Their product goes away for some pretty medeival prices (especially for the Amish, who can't easily travel to and from the auctions). So, we just started seeing what they'd like to get rid of, and offering more than what they'd get (and less than retail) for some cases. As a result, farmers have become friendly and open to selling us large amounts of fantastic seasonal produce for very agreeable prices. So is anyone curious about cooking/the food industry or have anything they want to discuss? If anyone's interested, I'll keep up on our little science experiments and trips. I've also had plans for a food blog where I want to teach people how to cook. Not like "here's some recipes." I want to teach someone how to efficiently feed themselves and others the way some cook making 200 perfect meals a night would.
  10. I didn't guess the Mauser or HK right, but the HK was a little more of an "ooooooohhhhh" moment when I realize I've heard it a million times in games and movies. Fun video, and they seem much more relaxed than their Assault Rifle video.
  11. That thing looks so great. You guys are killing me with this. If I go to the gun show next week, I'll probably put down for one of those if I see a good one.
  12. I read Band of Brothers before I saw the movie. BoB was probably the best thing Ambrose ever did, and that's much less back-handed than I make it sound. Unlike his other works, it didn't pretend to be anything other than a collective unit memoir, and it did a good job with that. He never did any real analyzation, he just relayed some stories and framed them well. The mini-series was well-done, and I think really broke the mold for war drama, in that it had well fleshed-out characters (they'd even had men from the unit to make sure actors were walking, talking, and acting like they did in real life). I always had the problem growing up of not knowing who was who in a movie because they were all just Generic Handsome Hollywood Guys in helmets. BoB utilized its mini-series format as to build up characters before and during their first deployments. There's a mixture of good action and good writing. I only really didn't like how they tried to really deify characters based on real people to the point where Richard Winters is now playing on both sides of every team in a Modern Warfare multiplayer game.
  13. I'm not familiar with their general infantry, but their special forces seem to have a reputation for fighting ability.
  14. Have there been any other tests on the G36 rifles, or have any export countries come forward with complaints? It seems like a country like Saudi Arabia would notice some problems.
  15. This is interesting, because although it seems like conservatives could use it to rile up the base, democrats could as well. The latter seems more direct and likely, but I doubt they have the good will in the state department to initiate something like this, even if it amounts to a benign little re-clarification of terms. I guess I wasn't in the best of moods when I saw that. I had a shoulder bruise and headache from firing some free surplus .303 I got (never fire free .303 surplus ow). I made the mistake of using my Google log-in, and now I have a lot of Hello From the Internet in some of my social media. Stay classy, internet commentors. On a positive note, Pat and Alex had a fun video today.
  16. If I could have spray-painted that the outside the Bursar the day I had to duck out of my Poli-Sci degree I would have.
  17. And Oregon's weird laws, too, and a bunch of other stuff. I know. Just imagine if the focus was shifted away from the current rhetoric to a solid focus on bad legislation, and a focus on protection of legal rights of firearm owners, instead.
  18. Yeah, I understand there are problems, but as always, it's mis-directed. And I think they (the people you mentioned) are taking advantage of all of that. I don't think Barack gives a fly-fuck in a puddle about the Korean Garands, just that maybe Feinstein and maybe someone else wanted it. He put his signature down and went down to caring about more pressing issues.
  19. I am interested who these "top people" he mentioned to me were. Without any names, it really comes off as the Nintendo Uncle defense.
  20. I'm sorry. Please feel free to delete this whole mess, and I'll never bring it up again. It's a pointless thread as well.
  21. Yeah, I really don't want to shit where Baby eats, if you guys can stomach the metaphor. Yeah, but Bel, I don't think you'd want to be caught talking about your boss like that on the internet, so take it easy.
  22. Greg, but whatever. Someone even did George, which are the two names people remember over my own in real life, too. Weird. Also, Phil is coming off as kind of a jerk. I guess they kind of wanted this for a while. edit: Lol, one guy wants me to sign an affadavit saying that I'm not an ATF agent or whatever, and Phil wants me to prepare a formalized apology for when he blows my mind.
  23. Think of the general attitudes of Germans and Soviets toward surrendering to each other versus Germans surrendering to the Americans. There were enough who fought to the death to delay Soviets while others were surrendering in droves to the Western allies. If you surrendered to an American, you got meals, medical care, more rights than the average black GI, and some work detail making golf courses in Texas. I'm betting more than a few ISIS soldiers are just a bunch of people who'd throw down their rifles to get the hell away from a desert warzone against a greater military power.
  24. That's what I'd assume (I'm getting a little combative in the comments with it). It really seems like a publication would only be in legal trouble if they were the immediate source of the leak, which means they're gaining their own information on un-released products and publishing them without a company's permission. That means it strikes me more as copy protection. On a positive note, I read the second entry of your series, Nate, and you have me hooked.
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