Yeah I gotta get with the times. Everyone at my work watches movies online and here I am spending a fortune on DVDs. I still buy paper books and mags too. Guess I just like having physical things that I can collect.
When are you scheduled to be on Hoarders? Heh heh. Kidding.
I hate how my magazines pile up. I usually find a Saturday morning open about once every few months and flip through them at lighting speed and then toss.
The only one I've held on to lately is the American Rifleman with that gorgeous new "Winchester" 1873.
The 1873 is one of the many possible stories as to why Amateur Radio operators sign off with "73". That particular story goes that a railroad telegrapher used to sign off with "I will you my '73" to his fellow operators on the circuit since the '73 was a coveted rifle at the time. Over time that got shortened to "73" in Railroad Code and made it's way onto the Amateur Bands.
There's other stories that attempt to explain "73" but none that follow a logical progression. So I'm going with that one.
With a grandfather who was a Union Pacific telegrapher and who taught me how to shoot, and my Amateur a Radio hobby which worked backwards to my dad, the announcement that someone is making new '73s made me smile. I think one needs to go into the rifle collection for all of those reasons. Plus, I don't have any lever-action rifles, and always loved those.
There's far better lever-action rifles (Winchester's rifles got a lot better after they discovered John Moses Browning in Utah and he started designing for Winchester) but the '73 is iconic. There have also been a couple of Hollywood movies about the rifle. You also hear the phrase that the '73 "won the West" but those aren't based in historical quotes. That was a Winchester marketing campaign started in the early 1900's around 1906.
So... That magazine stays on the coffee table until I see some reviews of that rifle and buy one.
Then I'll have to buy flat nosed cartridges or reload for it. Ha. Never had to care with any of the other rifles, but pointy bullets in a tube can poke the backside of other cartridges and make things go kaboom that shouldn't be going kaboom yet.
That magazine is going to cost me $2 grand. Damnit. LOL. That's mainly why it's still sitting there. Ha.
So ... we all have our collections...!
