At their April 2-3 auction, Amoskeag will be selling seven more rifles previously owned the greatest gun writer of the first portion of the last century, Townsend Whelen. Full descriptions are not yet available.
The rumor on Internet gun discussion groups is that these rifles are part of the ongoing residue of Mark Benenson‘s astounding collection.
Anthony Burgess, author of Clockwork Orange, resident in 1973 in Rome, was overdue in supplying “a thinkpiece” commissioned by Rolling Stone, and wrote his editor (Hunter S. Thompson) offering to submit a 50,000-word novella he’d just finished on the condition humaine instead. Thompson replied thusly:
[Juan Bautista Alberdi argued that Liberty produces in the common man the anguish of responsibility and he therefore yearns for an absolute monarchy and no obligation to decide. Thus the death of the Ancien Regime spills over into Socialism. He saw a hundred years ahead.]
Bob Henderson lost more money in 2008 than I did, and he seems to have learned a few things about the limits of the calculative powers of human reason. A model is only a model.
I’d lost almost $200 million in October. November wasn’t looking any better.
It was 2008, after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Markets were in turmoil. Banks were failing left and right. I worked at a major investment bank, and while I didn’t think the disastrous deal I’d done would cause its collapse, my losses were quickly decimating its commodities profits for the year, along with the potential pay of my more profitable colleagues. I thought my career could be over. I’d already started to feel those other traders and salespeople keeping their distance, as if I’d contracted a disease.
I landed in London on the morning of November 4, having flown overnight from New York. I was a derivatives trader, but also the supervisor of the bank’s oil options trading team, about a dozen guys split between Singapore, London, and New York. Until this point I’d managed the deal almost entirely on my own, making the decisions that led to where I … we … were now. But after a black cab ride from Heathrow to our Canary Wharf office, I got the guys off the trading floor and into a windowless conference room and confessed: I’d tried everything, but the deal was still hemorrhaging cash. Even worse, it was sprouting new and thorny risks outside my area of expertise. In any case, the world was changing so quickly that my area of expertise was fast becoming obsolete. I pleaded for everyone to pitch in. I said I was open to any ideas.
The Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife is a stiletto with an overall length of 11.5 inches and a double-edged blade of 7 inches. There are a number of variations which include such differences as minor changes in the length of the blade, the design and shape of the pommel, manufacturer’s stamps, and handles that have different grip patterns and materials (metal, wood, and compressed leather washers).
The Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife was designed by William Ewart Fairbairn and Eric Anthony Sykes, and was based on the Shanghai Fighting Knife they designed while serving as constables in the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP), the multinational police force of Shanghai’s international community. Prior to World War II, Shanghai had the reputation of being the most dangerous city in the world.
Christopher Lee evidently used one during WWII. The Week:
Long before he embarked on his illustrious acting career, Christopher Lee… was a member of the British Special Forces in World War II, a unit that engaged in acts of espionage and subterfuge against the Third Reich, including blowing up bridges, disrupting supply lines, and, yes, killing Nazis.
It turns out his experiences in warfare came in handy in the filming of The Lord of the Rings, when his character Saruman was stabbed in the back by Grima Wormtongue in a scene that was not included in the theatrical release. As director Peter Jackson explained in the movie’s DVD commentary, he tried to get Lee to scream as he was stabbed, only to be corrected. “Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody’s stabbed in the back?” Lee said he asked Jackson. “Because I do. [I]t’s more of a gasp because the breath is driven out of your body.”
Trooper Stan W Scott, No. 3 Army Commando, demonstrates how to use the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.
China turned us into bad people. The pushing, the shoving, the pollution, the spitting, the lack of respect toward the environment and their fellow human beings, the oily food, the wasteful attitude that is now ingrained in their psyche, we could go on. This is not to say we didn’t have great experiences and meet wonderful people, because we definitely did. But those moments were far less common for us. We hate being negative, and it may sound arrogant or pathetic, but that is the truth.
We would snap at each other over small things, and these minor arguments would turn into all-day affairs. Alesha would get angry at me over trivial matters, and I would retaliate. In the end I stopped being the caring partner that I should be. I neglected Alesha’s feelings and she would attack me for neglecting her. I continued to neglect her because I couldn’t stand being attacked. It was a vicious cycle.
Alesha started to resent travel, and I grew numb to it. Nothing excited us anymore. Just like you can lose your passion for a hobby when it becomes a job, we’re starting to become jaded with travel.
We hadn’t done proper exercise for longer than we could remember,†Salem wrote, “ate a lot of dodgy foods that had little nutritional value and put on weight. This just made us feel even more down. Alesha has always said that if your stomach is happy, you are happy. Well after the diet we experienced across China, Mongolia and Central Asia, our stomachs definitely weren’t happy.â€
“At some point we sat down and realized that the best thing for us was to go our separate ways for a while, to give ourselves a break from each other.”
