Family wallops would-be robber, wraps things up for police: "WEST PALM BEACH — While covering his head amid the barrage of flying fists and feet, his legs bound with a jump-rope by children half his size, a bruised and bloodied Craig Mack had a sudden realization, police say: He'd picked the wrong family to mess with.
Mack arrived at the Perez family home at 611 28th St. Monday night just as an exhausted Mateo Perez was getting home from a 12-hour day of landscaping and cleaning buildings. Mack probably figured he could swipe Perez's wallet and get away without much of a fight, police said."
If they're not citizens yet, I vote we award them citizenship immediately.
26 comments:
Yes, people should do a better job of standing up for themselves. It would deter some of this nonsense.
When they named Sam Colt's revolver "the peacemaker", there was not even a trace of irony or sarcasm in it.
Shouldn't that be wobber.
Back in the 1920's, the Ithaca Gun Company sold a double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun with a pistol grip called the "Auto and Burglar".
"Auto" because you could put it in the glove compartment of your Pierce-Arrow. And "Burglar", well, because those were the intended recipients of what came out of the barrels. Price: $40.55 in the late '20s. Outlawed by the Feds in 1934. Too bad. Mack Perez and family would have had an easier time of it.
Yes, the Perez family would be good candidates for citizenship. There are probably many familiies like them with kids in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe we can trade them for an equal number of New York Upper East Siders...
That would be an unfair trade, Skook. We need to get up to at least a 10/1 ratio for it to be equitable.
Never liked the safety on that model side-by-side. It's a thumb center-toggle between the breech and the break pivot, and unless you look at it in good light, you have to remind yourself "push/fire, pull/safe" (or is it the other way around?).
Then, when one of the kids is using it, you have to worry about *their* memories, too.
The exposed-hammer side-by-side is neat-looking and positive-safe.
Buddy:
The exposed-hammer side-by-side is neat-looking and positive-safe.
Correct. The only problem with exposed hammer side by sides is that you should get a new one - like a Pedersoli Coach Gun - instead of a 100 year old one that is metallurgically perhaps not so sound. As in "kaboom - barrel rupture" not so sound.
A concatenation of several things made me write that post about the Auto and Burglar. Last Saturday, while going to Home Depot and the computer store, I saw an honest-to-God Deusenberg two door convertible on the freeway. Not a replica, but the real deal. Cobalt blue, ancient license plate. It was one of those sunny Seattle Saturdays when all the old cars come out. Then, on the way home, I passed one of those Mexican lunch trucks that said something like "Taqueria Los Tres Hermanos" on the side and vowed to eat at one sometime soon.
So the linkage was Perez family, Mexican lunch truck, Deusenberg, Auto and Burglar. Or something.
And yes Rick, the ratio should be 10 to 1.
Skook, Rossi still makes the hammer shotgun. I have one, called "the Overland", just like Gabby Hayes carried on the stagecoach, except it's modern-made. Well, 70s, if that's modern.
You know Buddy, it is an odd deal with me. I'm as good a friend to global commerce as you will ever find, but somehow - don't ask what particular DNA strand or bit of snyaptic wiring is responsible - I can't own a foreign firearm. As in Can Not.
I mean, intellectually, I know how good the Rossi this and Uberti that and even the Stoegers and Baikals are - better than our domestic equivalents very often. Or in the case of Holland and Holland and whatnot, very much better.
But somehow, I'm caught in this Remington - Marlin - Ruger - S&W - Colt Detective Special - Savage - LC Smith - Fox Sterlingworth - pre-64 Winchester time warp. A time warp of walnut and blued steel where I happily reside. And somehow they are friendly guns. Not the guns that cops use to take down a crack house, though those have their place, too. These are Grandpa's guns. Kinda strange, but I'm happy enough.
Oddly enough, I know exactly what you mean.
I bought the Rossi when I was working in Brazil, tho, as a thank you to the nice associates. Bought it here, but while doing hitch work there.
Same kind of whimsy, trying to add a dimension to the little things, as a sort of hobby.
Really sweet little lightweight short-barrel, cost about $50, learned today looking for it on the web that it's discontinued (tho not Rossi's hammer line) and worth $600. Hey, that's better than a sharp stick in the eye!
Buddy:
when I was working in Brazil
Where in Brazil? I've worked on projects in various places, also in Paraguay. Interesting.
My one exception that proves the rule is a current project - a lefty 870 Marine Magnum. I was going to modify my bog standard cheapie Wal-Mart 870 Express left hand to accept an extended magazine and a few other things and synthetic furniture. An Alaska camp gun.
So I got the parts from Brownell's and some used bits from Numrich, set them out on my workbench in the garage, looked at them some more, looked at my toolboxes and the lathe, and right then and there decided to send them off to somebody competent. The cardboard box awaits with open maw. When it comes back from the gunsmith off it shall go to get electroless nickeled. Hey, it's only money.
Interesting too, how they can appreciate. Ya never know.
That 870 is a fail-save workhorse--but that's a pretty extensive modification. You probly did wise to hand off to a real shop.
I was in Venezuela most of my South American sojourn, offshore some--tests in the Golfo, but most of the time out of Anaco & El Tigre and southeast. I was consulting for Fluidos de Perforacion, under CorpoVen, but mainly on Santa Fe rigs--which they lent out to Petrobras a few times in the Orinoco basin area. Those heavy crude wells in the southeast that Hugo just expropriated (or nearly so), I was the drilling fluid tech on the wildcats that found that stuff, late 70s early 80s. I finally quit and came back stateside as the kids were growing up without me, month-long hitches with little sleep as the Vens had a native-training rig-crews program, and they were not experienced, to put it mildly. So, stay awake a month in the jungle, go home and sleep a month to catch up, then go back. Okay for a young guy, for a few years, cause the $$$ was so good.
What were you doing down there? If it was illegal, don't tell me!
\;-D
I tried to shop Venezuela, too, but couldn't keep buying fruit baskets forever.
Buddy:
I was in the project startup end of the mining biz: copper, zinc, bauxite, you name it. I got to see all the tourist spots...
Nothing like sleeping in a thatched hut on slits a million miles from nowhere. Or in a container house in 120 degree heat. Kind of like crawling in to your Weber grill and closing the lid. With, as Calvin once said in the comic strip, bugs "as big as Kaiser rolls". Or the roads. Over the Andes under the camper shell of a Toyota Hi-Lux pickup through hairpin turns on a one-lane "highway" and all you can see through the scratched plexiglass is a cloud of dust...
Closest I ever got to your end on the oil biz was when I turned down a job consulting for the OSV operations in the Java Sea. Did you see the Discovery or History Channel thing on modern day pirates? Yup. So I chickened out.
As you say, a young man's game.
But Caracas was nice, right? Or did you get mugged?
Hey, we were despoiling innocent defenseless Mother Gaia. Not despoiling Gaia in the conventional sense of "my car only gets 12 miles per gallon" but on the cutting edge of the despoiling.
And dammed proud of it, too, in my case...
Think back on the opportunities we gave to people who so desperately wanted to join the modern world, just like everybody else.
Right-o--tell the indians in the outback about Gaia--ha! They got Gaia up the wazoo; they want Westinghouse.
Caracas is utterly sublime, the mountains running down to the sea and moons as big as dinner plates over the silvery sea. Never mugged except whatever I did to myself, which was tantamount to it a few times, ouch.
The highways--mercy. two lane strips, no shoulder, often a foot of drop-off the outside edge, and everybody barreling along on bald tires at 100 mph on that 20-cent gas. Little groups of crosses stuck in the ground every few miles where someone had a head-on, and the families placed the little wooded memorials at the site. Cities were okay, but that back country--wow. The firsy 707 I caught, out of Maracaibo to Anaco or someplace, I board the ship, the AC is off and it's hot, and the pilot is sitting at the yoke in his drawers. Little indians about 4' tall running around everywhere with a parrot or a monkey on their shoulder, grinning like maniacs. Wasted American ex-pats in the bars running out their strings, can't go home because of all the subpoenas and such. Wild west.
Oh jeezus, you nailed it. Sounds like Surinam. They have their one highway that goes west to east from Apoera on the Courantyne River, on the border with Guyana, to Paramaribo. The Dutch built it, complete with little erector set bridges over the rivers. When built, the highway was crowned and had signs and drainage ditches on each side and the steel bridges had wooden planks.
After independence, they had a coup and Sargeant Whatshisname took over and the Dutch pulled the plug. So the highway reverted to the jungle. I once rode in a pickup along the length of the thing and the driver put a chainsaw in the back. What does he need that for? Turns out that trees fall over on to the "highway" and are never removed. You just chainsaw out a section of tree trunk wide enough for your vehicle to pass. So you'll be driving along, then abruptly do a quick fallen tree avoidance maneuver aiming for the gap, then straight again. The trick is to notice the gap in time, or slow down soon enough to get out and cut the tree trunk yourself. Nobody bothers to clear the entire road.
On the bridges, the wooden planking had disintegrated such that it was jostled with every vehicle that passed. So before crossing each bridge, you would stop and walk out over the bridge and carefully rearrange the remaining decent planks to fit the wheelbase of your car, taking care not to fall into the Nickerie River. Do you remember those huge silver fishes in those rivers? They were about eight feet long. They'd catch them from dugout canoes.
Speaking of old Boeings, in Mozambique the national airline LAM had an old 727 that all the international aid people called "Old Smokey". Anyway, we were taking off and I noticed that my seat was off the track on one side. When we landed in Johannesburg, all the overhead compartment doors popped open simultaneously.
And in the most godforsaken hellholes, some crazy burnt out American ex-hippie who wanted to talk and avoid you at the same time.
Ahh, yes.
Johannesburg--you must've been contracted to some gold miners, too, huh? Boy, betcha THAT fee scale is jumping!
being a South Africa hand and a gun guy, you must know this site--Kim DuToit--lots of gun pics & info and SA lore--
Johannesburg is like Butte, Montana in the middle of LA. Or rather five or six Buttes in the middle of LA. So an old mine hoist head frame and a slag heap three blocks from a skyscraper, that sort of thing.
There is a minerals storage complex outside Johannesburg at a place called City Deep. This is like something out of James Bond. Razor wire, cameras, electric fences. Plus, when you enter, at the guard house there was some retired South African or British Army sargeant major type with the walrus mustache who gives you one of those trembling, open hand salutes. "Saah!" That was in 2000 or so.
Yeah, I check Kim's site every so often, though at times he's a bit over the top for my taste.
Anyway, security at City Deep must be twice as tight today, what with minerals prices on the up and up.
Yeh--he's a wild man.
If you haven't seen 'em, by all means rent the movies "The Gods Must Be Crazy" -- and the same-name sequel, "part II". South Africa, 70s, the brush wars with Angola and Cuba, and the little Hottentots trying to make sense--they're the sweetest-spirited comedies I believe I've ever seen. Aussie flix, about Southern Africa.
That is what people tell me. I've always meant to rent them. Thanks for the reminder.
So it is agreed then, finally, after the 23rd comment, that the guy tangled with the wrong family and that the meritorious conduct of that family should tilt the scales of citizenship in their favor.
Isn't the internet wonderful?
And now that Buddy has me thinking about Southern Africa and the British Empire, I've decided to listen to Elgar's Enigma Variations.
Pierre Monteux and the London Symphony.
Well yakkin' with you about old times brought back some fun memories, that otherwise might've never seen the light of recall again--who knows. So, it was a recharge--yep, the internet is wonderful!
Likewise.
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