Many thanks to those who actually
did respond to my rather uninteresting microwave thread. We’ve had threads about various pieces of hardware, and I picked the microwave oven as just another piece of hardware – another tool. Not surprisingly, nobody added photographs of
their microwave. After all, a microwave oven has a limited number of uses, these being to cook or otherwise heat up food, warming dishes or cups, drying socks etc.
If, instead of “My new microwave”, this thread had been called “My new hole punch”, I might have received even fewer replies, as a hole punch has even fewer uses than a microwave oven, its only use to make holes in paper! It’s just another piece of hardware or office equipment that spends its life in a desk drawer. But suppose I’d called the thread “My new gun”? No need to speculate as to what would have happened. Our good friend GTO has already started a thread called that. It resulted in more than 50 replies and 13 photographs of a total of 15 guns! And yet, the only purpose for many of these guns is, like the lowly hole punch, to put holes in pieces of paper. As GTO himself put it:
“I would have bought it eventually anyway, I just love guns, I like taking them apart to see how they work, like Laz says the are a mechanical Marvel. I have taken every gun I own apart, almost all the way to clean them and see what makes them tick, the only one I didn't was the 1911 my dad built and had a custom trigger job done on it. He told me NEVER take it apart and I respect that since I may not be able to get it back together as well as the pistol smith did. The gun was built for one thing, putting .45 inch holes in paper. Their are two primary reasons I own guns, one they interest me and I like seeing how they work. The second is to shoot for fun, both my Girlfriend and I enjoy shooting allot, and when I was doing it all the time I was shooting close to 400 rounds a week, just for fun.”Well, that’s fair enough. Some of us might be fascinated by how a microwave oven works – it is a mechanical marvel - but if I wrote about removing the magnetron from my own oven, and marvelling at how it worked, I don’t think I would have got many replies. So why then do we have guys
falling over themselves to post pics of
their particular piece of hardware, when that happens to be a gun? Not a complicated piece of equipment, not many controls, and the overall design dates back several centuries. Is cooking more interesting than shooting? Depends who you ask. In a typical women’s magazine like Good Housekeeping, you’d probably find 3-4 articles about cooking/recipes, but none about guns. And yet we are led by the gun lobby to believe that women are more defenceless than men and need the most protection, and that a gun is not something to be feared but is just another tool...
Nope. It’s all about
power, and all about
ego. The other subject that might get folks going is cars, and for the same reasons. Start up a thread about cars, as our friend BUG_EAF did about his cherished VW Bug, and after the initial replies to the post, the subject quickly moves on to who’s got the
fastest car, whose car can get to 70mph in the shortest time. The photographs will be piling in, and the latest photograph is likely to be bigger than the one that went before. As Dowding has observed, so many threads in the O’Club take the form of
My schlong is bigger than yours, so then someone ups the ante by having TWO schlongs. And the thread about guns will go something like this:
Got a gun? I’ve got a bigger gun. Well mine has more bullets than yours. Well mine can fire its bullets faster than yours. Oh well I’ve got an automatic weapon that can fire 30 rounds with one squeeze of the trigger. Oh, well I’ve got TWO automatic weapons!Of course, most private gun owners are in the US. I am fascinated by Americans’ needs to outdo eachother. My American geography teacher told us about the rivalry between Alaska and Texas – Americas two largest states. The Alaskan might say
”There’s enough gold in Alaska to build a three foot wall all around Texas”. And the Texan would reply
”You go and build that wall, and if I like it, I’ll buy it!” LOL! Don’t you just love the Yanks.
Yep, give a gun-Yank half a chance to show off how much power he’s got, and he just can’t get the words out fast enough. The BBS will be awash with people exhibiting their own portfolio of machismo hardware.
Oh, almost forgot! My microwave is a 750 watt “Category D” and is programmable with a grill and turntable.
I’m just off to do the last of my Xmas shopping. I’ll use the Beetle now that the weather has warmed up to a searing 10°. 0-60mph on the same day – lol.
Hehe! Merry freaking Christmas
