Neanderpundit

For Vman- and anyone who hasn’t been there- Bufflao range is in Ottawa Illinois. The range website is here:

The range fee is $25 per person per day. You supply your own guns and ammo. Bring stuff you want to shoot to smithereens, so long as it meets the Buffalo range criteria.

Update: We could also book this thing at Willow Slough. That way we could camp there friday evening, shoot saturday, return to the campground saturday evening for a picnic, and leave, or stay the night saturday and go home sunday. Fishing, camping, shooting. A near-primitive campground (no showers yet) but actual bathrooms (as opposed to portajohns)

Mrs D has posted an excellent essay written by her daughter. Wendy is a grown woman in her own right but the essay shows a level of maturity that few people attain before they reach 40.

Wendy takes a well-deserved poke at the folks who flock to the movies we used to call “Splatter punk”.

me, I’ve never been much of a fan, becuase the hard fact of reality is gorier and more horrible than anything the movies have to offer.

I haven’t been to war, and I thank god for that, because I didn’t have to experience the violence and horror of injury and death while fearing for my own life, in a situation where there was no time or place to grieve or be upset at the nastiness.

I have- however- been up close with horrible injury and death. Working in industry- especially heavy industry, steel, iron, you have plenty opportunities to get hurt. You get reminded an awful lot that death and injury are close at hand and easily acquired.

On more occasions than I’d like to remember, I saw people horribly mangled and wounded by industrial machinery. Some of the people that got hurt were new, and never lasted- or lived- long enough to learn to be wary. Some were old timers- long laborers under the conditions, who fell victim to a moment of inattention.

I have been with men whose arm I was touching while they were killed. I was close enough to death that it took the man next to me, literally- and not me. I have fallen to my knees to begin to vomit next to a dying man, and finished emptying my stomach next to a corpse.

When I go to a movie, I go to see some specific things. I go to see the bad guy lose, and the good guy win. And it happens, in movies, a lot. The truth is a lot less nice and cleanly packaged, or there would be no such thing as socialism or democrats.

If a little gore occurs during the movie, I don’t think of it too much, because all of it pales by comparison to the actual, real world things I have seen. Most of the time I don’t even notice.

Sweeney Todd- for instance- had a lot of really graphic neck slittings- but frankly, I knew they were cinematic so I never even looked at them. I DO know I wouldn’t take the daughter to see it.

No. I saw in Sweeney Todd a story of a wronged man, come home to wreak vengance, and wreaking the vengance in spades, while simultaneously singing a lot of catchy tunes. And having fun with it. The good guy wins. The bad guy loses. The boy gets the girl. This is my kind of movie. yeah, Mr P, the hero pays the ultimate price yadda yadda. It would have been finer still if he recognized his wife and got back together with her.
Having been subjected to things I’d like to unsee, I don’t flinch at the graphic or gory. The stories that piss me off- so much so that I will leave a theater, are the stories where people put their child in harms way, or someone puts children in harms way. That, to me, is more obscenity than the worst splatter punk there is, and just like I won’t go see splatter punk movies, I won’t go see a movie that puts kids (or the innocent in general) in harms way.

Would bitch about not having a link to her blog, which BEGINS with the following

Jees. This is why I left my first wife. OR why she left me, Or.. something.