ND-SS

Always painful to come back from a fun experience and find the Real World waiting for you...

Tomorrow's going to be a hellish day as we coordinate our DRTV coverage of the oral arguments on McDonald v. Chicago in the Supreme Court. We're also filming TBD/SURVIVAL segments with Michael Janich in Boulder this week. Later, I'll juggle eggs while riding a unicycle on our frozen streets.

I'm really stoked up on the Taylor's Schofield 3 1/2-incher (more correctly, a Number 3; 2nd Model clone) in .44 Russian.

The shortened barrel gives the gun an excellent balance (the Russian models and longer barrels always feel a bit unwieldy to me when compared to an SAA, for some reason). I've always thought they had a nice steampunkish sensibility about them...something Steampunk Zoe (pix below) might shoot...although that's hardly the reason for my interest (check previous posts for current .44 Russian obsession).

I'm thinking of lightweight .44 caliber swaged bullets, say 180 grains or, if I have to, 200 grainers, at 650 feet-per-second, which is just enough to have them roll out of the barrel...if you're really quick with your hands, you can slap 'em out of the air. The original .44 Russians were a 246 grain bullet @ 750 fps, not exactly a world-shaker that. The current Black Hills .44 Russian cowboy loads are 210-grainers @ 650 fps, which shoot about like .38 Special wadcutters and are crazy accurate out of .44 Special handguns. TiteGroup or Trail Boss powders should do it.

Sorry about random obsessions...sort of comes with the territory and serves as a mental exercise to keep me sane while working all the time...I'm designing (and plan to build) a cowboy holster that uses strange steampunk cogs instead of conchos on the belt...something a little creepily different...sort of like this ring:

...sort of fits with a novel I've been meaning to write about a one-armed gunman and a broken down whore who end up having to face down the Ol' Scratch in Memphis at the nightmarish heights of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic...no zombies to speak of, but a few Undead, heavily armed. I thought I might also reanimate Stonewall Jackson and give him a new part to play. No no no, I won't start this novel until I finish FIVE TO GO, sometime this century. The idea came from a line from a Memphis newspaper of that vintage I quoted in WHITE BOY SINGIN' THE BLUES, "The only difference between Hell and Memphis is that Hell's river runs through it while Memphis' river runs alongside it..."

I also once had this vision of the Peabody ducks on fire, but that could have been the tequila...

And speaking of speaking of, did I mention I've opened talks with a major holster manufacturer for a "Michael Bane Signature" line of holsters? I know what I like and it seems pretty hard to get these days, so I thought I'd take a stab at making something happen...may not come to fruition, but we'll see...