Ya gotta be able to drive with your top down to do that.

[Whimpers quietly and shakes fist at Fred.] I miss my Jeep....

Speaking of Jeeps, don't you think that Whitney Houston's daughter looks like a Jeep (or, rather, THE Jeep)?

OK, time to drag this thread out into the sunlight again.

Two questions :

1. In hotel bars (and probably other bars too) the happy hour offerings frequently include "you call it's". I gather the idea of a "you call it" is that it is sort of the bartending equivalent of '*' but there seems to be disagreement about whether it only covers "house" or "well" liquor or whether the "call" refers to "call" drinks where you pick the brand.

2. Revolvers have a small but non-zero gap between cylinder and barrel. It seems to me that given the pressure of the gases as the back of the bullet clears the gap any self-respecting gas would go out the gap rather than continuing to accelerate the bullet down the barrel, but longer revolver barrels do seem to produce higher velocities than short ones even so.

It seems unlikely (but not impossible) that the cartridge brass stretches just enough to seal the gap temporarily, but that wouldn't cover situations where a shorter cartridge is being fired, eg .38 special ammo in a .357 mag revolver.

Some pressure is lost through the cylinder gap (which runs around 5 thou), which is why you should never index a finger down the cylinder. A .500 S&W will cut through a finger with the gas pressure alone. The Mythbusters proved that one.

Revolver brass never stretches far enough to close that gap, if it did, it would run into the forcing cone. (plus, if brass stretched that far, you'd get head separation)

So, you do lose some pressure through the cylinder gap, but unless it's out of spec, it's not the issue you'd think. One guy at the range was shooting a Smith Model 19 with a 30-thou gap beside me one day - the pressure wave and lead spalling spitting out the sides of that gun made me wonder if it would be safer to just stand in front of it. I took him off the line until he had the barrel set back and the forcing cone recut.

Bren R.

As a former bartender, no matter in what state I worked, the well liquors are the ones right in front of your sinks. In good restaurants and bars, there are no Mr. Boston's, Gilbey's, etc. In those establishments, well liquors may include the likes of Absolut and Tanqueray. "Call" liquors could be anything the customer names and they are usually on shelves behind the bartender so you can see the brands and know what's on offer.

Your questions were about guns and booze. Are you sure you don't live in Texas?

BTW, Happy Hour has been illegal in Massachusetts since the mid 80's.

No one in Massachusetts has been happy since then.

No, there were brief surges in happiness in October 2004 and October 2007, followed by a quick return to Neurosis Baseballus.

Funny, I always picture him in my mind as JohnH:



John Hodgman, that is. Bestselling author, The Daily Show's "Resident Expert", minor television celebrity, and deranged millionaire.

Last year, JohnH published That Is All, the last book in a trilogy of Complete World Knowledge. Like its predecessors, The Areas of My Expertise and More Information Than You Require, That Is All compiles incredibly handy made-up facts into brief articles, overlong lists, and beguiling narratives on new and familiar themes. It picks up exactly where More Information left off - specifically, at page 596 - and finally completes COMPLETE WORLD KNOWLEDGE, just in time for the return of Quetzalcoatl and the end of human history in 2012.

[quote=medic8r Quetzalcoatl [/quote]

Did you have to look that up for spelling, or can you channel ancient Meso-American deities?