Art Books, FOFOA and Guns!

Three small items merit a blog article!

My brother and part of his family were just in town visiting us.  We took them to a touristy part of town, and while there I visited a specialty bookstore (Taschen), all their books are printed by the German piblisher Taschen as are all essentially art-related.  I had visited once before (months ago), but was not able to see their book on Symbols, as they had closed when I had finished eating...

THIS time though, we all went inside...  Quite a place...  I found the book (The Book of Symbols), edited by Ami Ronnberg.  It is almost 800 pages of almost incredible archetypal images.  And only $40.00.

"An opium den of a bookstore"

L A Weekly


I need some balance for my normally analytical / numerical mindset!  The book will probably even help improve my blog...  Visit them:

www.taschen.com

***

FOFOA has a new piece up at his blog.

He essentially further builds his case that the era of the US$ supremacy is over.  He studies the international monetary system starting right after WW I, when the Europeans created a "gold-exchange standard", which worked more-or-less OK until 1971 (when Nixon said No Mas! to foreigners wanting gold for their dollars). And afterwards the US$ STILL reigned supreme, as exporters (as a group) had to allow us trade deficits for them to be able to export more to the US than they imported (which was their desire).

That all started to change (for the worse) in 2005, when the effects of US .gov consumption starts heavily weighting the balance towards doomsday...  Uh, no, the end will not be pretty for some...

READ all about it, and see the fun video at the end:

fofoa.blogspot.com

***

As I mentioned at the top of this piece, my brother was in town, with his wife and 16-year old son in tow.  Most of their time here was spent on doing the usual touristy stuff in my city, but I offered the two guys to join me at the range to shoot my guns.  My nephew has been over-exposed to women most of his life, and I figured that he would like that (and the fact that he follows military and geopolitical topics, he was the one who showed that there was such a thing on cable TV called "The Military Channel", your ever-clueless author never knew).

Those of you who have followed my blog for a while know that I like guns, but that I am no expert and certainly do not own an armory worth bragging about.  So, off to the indoor range (much closer) where we gents had our fun (with my semi-auto AK-47 and my 9 mm Beretta).  They had not shot those weapons before, and so actually had a new experience, fun!  Of course my nephew kept the "Mutant Zombie" target that he shot a magazine (thx Jay!) from each weapon at.  I told him to bring it to school to show his friends...

When we went to pay, I asked the Operations Manager (a patient man, bravo and + 1 to him) how to put the AK back together again after field-stripping it.  For whatever reason, I had had trouble not being able to re-assemble a gun specially-made for teenage morons...  So, he showed me EXACTLY how to do that (I had been having trouble placing the "piston" in there correctly).  We all conversed about guns in general after that, especially about the .50 caliber BMGs he had sold.  It is a very heavy gun (45 lbs), and whenever someone wanted to see it, it was heavy and difficult for him (or any of his employees) to take the beast down off its wires (how it was displayed).  But, one day a customer just took the thing with one hand and played with it like it was a plastic picnic knife...  Turns out he was a WWF wrestler!

So there!  That's how the past few days have been for me!