Machine Gun Auction

Do you have more money than you can spend? Do you want to preserve some serious history?

And do you want to have your own MG-42 (along with tons of other machine guns)?

Check out this auction

Richard L. Wray Collection Auction

And if you don't have tons of money, just go look anyway, because there are some amazing pieces of history there.

308 Reasons to Love Italy

Ferrari 308 rally. Some people may disagree, but I think this car is amazing.

Looking Back

I look at old photos - mostly from WWII - and sitting here I really start to think about them. I find it amazing that to the people in the photos, the war wasn't history. It was the present. We view the past in a sort of jaded way. We are looking back on it and that changes our view in a way. We have to realize that these people, the ones in the photograph, and the one behind the camera, aren't just some people who did something once in a battle, they were people. They had families and lives and problems. They all loved, they all hated, they all needed money, they all knew what it was like to imagine the future. These people were caught up in a crazy bunch of events, collisions between nation's armies and intense political battles. Danger, heartbreak, fear, love. We look back on these things and say "oh why of course the Germans are the bad guys. All those guys were Nazis." But we forget that they were just people. Just normal people. All caught up in something crazy and out of their control. That is how I like to look at history.

Small

I need to learn to feel small again.

Lagging Behind

Steam locomotives still in daily use in North Korea in the early 1980s. Photo by Japanese photojournalist Hiroji Kubota.

Iraq War Photos

Take a few minutes and look back at what was a very large part of the early 21st century and a large part of my life so far.

Photos: The Iraq War, 10 years on

Logic

I live in the US, and I find things like this to be very curious. I live in a very wealthy country, but why can't we even think of doing this? There's the typical responses; It's too much work, it's too expensive, we've got plenty of oil and coal.

Well, if India can do it, why can't we?

Sicily

The Drive for Messina 10 July - 17 August 1943: A German Panzer III  knocked out during the fierce street fighting in Centuripe.

Spares

A German Panzer IV in North Africa. One unusual bit about this tank is that the crew was using a section of tread to carry a few extra bogies.

Mimas in Blue

Mimas, a tiny icy moon of Saturn 398 kilometers across (247 miles), is seen dwarfed against the azure backdrop of Saturn's northern latitudes in this true color view. The dark long lines seen on the atmosphere are shadows cast by Saturn’s rings. A few visible large craters give Mimas a dimpled appearance.

The image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft's narrow angle camera on January 18, 2005, when it was approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Saturn. The resolution is 8.5 kilometers (5.3 miles) per pixel on Saturn and 7.5 kilometers (4.7 miles) per pixel on Mimas.

Saturn’s northern hemisphere was relatively cloud-free at that time and so rays from the Sun took a longer path through the atmosphere. This resulted in the sunlight being scattered at shorter (bluer) wavelengths and gave the northernmost latitudes their bluish hues at visible wavelengths.

The image was taken using infrared (930 nanometers), green (568 nanometers) and ultraviolet (338 nanometers) spectral filters, which were then combined. The colors were then adjusted to match what the scene would look like in natural color.

Abyss

I can't say a thing,
I can't internalize it,
So I'll find a picture to stare at,
Think about another place,
Post it on a blog,

And sent it out into the Abyss.

The Strenght of Bamboo

A Land Rover from the Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition in 1955.

Worlds Away, Right at Home

Volker Maiwald walks among the rock formations during a simulated Mars walk in the Utah desert, on March 2, 2013.

Clear Blue and Rust

Unseen, One-of-a-Kind, and Improvised.

This is the AR-10, the 7.62 NATO version of the M-16 series rifle. It was never made in large numbers. It is a rather attractive rifle in my opinion.

This is a Spencer repeating carbine decorated by Native American warriors.

This captured shotgun - I believe found in India - is totally home-made.It's pump-action, uses a detachable magazine (probably the only one, so still slow to reload) and has an interesting rotating action. The action reminds me a lot of the action of the Charlton light machine gun (I posted about it a few months ago). Definitely an interesting gun.

Perched

We have tested the waters,
We are perched at water's edge,
Now all we have to do.....

......is learn how to dive.

 

 

Valid Points

Feeling Small Yet?

The sizes of the solar system to scale. And to think that our star is actually tiny compared to some out there.......

The Future of the Past

Old science fiction.

Can't hurt to dream, right?

Curls

A Tupolev Tu-95 churning its way through the clouds.

New Owners

Mid-July 1944, between the villages of Giberville and Cuverville east of Caen, a Sherman Firefly VC 148th RAC / 33rd Armored Brigade captured by s.Pz.Abt. 503.

In the Western Desert both the Germans and the British commonwealth used quite a few captured tanks. This is the first example I've seen of the use of a captured tank in Normandy though. They picked a good tank though, I would call the British Firefly one of the best Sherman variants.

Two Favorites

Observing a solar eclipse on January 1, 1907, in the Tian-Shan mountains, probably in modern-day Uzbekistan. This is a photograph taken by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, a chemist and photographer who invented a new process for color photography and used it to document the Russian empire in the time period 1905-1915

Speed, Space-age, and Spa

Mercedes 300 SEL 6.8 at the 1971 24 Hours of Spa endurance race in Belgium.

A Porsche 917 at Le Mans in 1970.

Asymmetry

The Blohm & Voss BV 141 was a World War II German tactical reconnaissance aircraft. It is notable for its uncommon structural asymmetry. While performing well it was never ordered into full scale production. Reasons for that include the non-availability of the preferred engine, and competition from another tactical reconnaissance aircraft, the Focke-Wulf Fw 189.

Cards in the Sand

Luftwaffe pilots playing cards during the African campaign, 1942. The plane in the background is a Me-109.