Blógünder Schlock

Today was the Elders’ Quorum annual “Guns & Pizza” event. This year, because of budget restructuring, we only had about $40 to work with for pizza, which does not buy pies sufficient to feed 20 guys.

No problem. I volunteered to make double-decker dutch-over pizzas for all. The ingredients hit our budget for $35, and this morning I loaded up five dutch ovens with the help of Cort, Will, and Brian.

I wish we’d taken pictures. We made straight pepperoni, BBQ chicken, ham & pineapple, supreme, and pizzagna pizzas, and it turns out that five dutch ovens is exactly how many will fit in TurboSchlock’s trunk.

The pies were assembled between 8:30 and 9:30, but we didn’t start cooking them until about 11:30. That means they had time to rise. Sure enough, three of them rose enough that during cooking they brushed the tops of the ovens — which I had thoughtfully brushed with olive oil against just such a possibility.

We had a good crowd show up, and they managed to eat 80% of the pizza (mostly by overeating - each of these pies will feed eight). I was quite pleased with everything except the pizzagna. SOMEBODY (we’ll name no names) forgot to add basil, even after talking about how important spices would be on this most experimental of pies. It turned out kind of bland. Maybe somebody should have added a little salt, too.

Oh, and the guns — Mostly we shot skeet. I was exhausted after eating, so I headed home before they headed up to the pistol and rifle range. I hit maybe half of what I shot at, which stinks, but at least I nailed the very first skeet I drew a bead on. After close to two years of no practice, that felt really good.

Mike Williamson pointed me at this article, which describes hunting Wisconsin whitetail deer with a 12 pound Mountain Howitzer cannon.

I’ve gone cannoning before (a friend of mine made a 72mm black-powder cannon, and we fired frozen-juice canisters filled with cement out of it on more than one occasion), but I’ve never undertaken to HUNT with one. This fella has.

Well, I dug around on his site a little bit, and found another choice article: if deer hunting isn’t your speed, how about feral cat hunting — this time with a coehorn mortar?

Besides being good for a laugh, both of these articles are full of very practical information. And if you’ve got the money lying around, this guy will be happy to sell you plans for building your own large-bore black-powder replicas. (Note: “replica” in this case means “fully functional replica of a 19th-century weapon”)

This is a guy I’d love to have as a drinking buddy… though perhaps not as a next-door neighbor. Unless we’ve got really, really big yards.

NOTE: Apparently when I said “good for a laugh,” some of you reached the erroneous (though understandable) conclusion that I find killing “funny.” The parts I find funny in the article above are not the photos of dead animals. They’re in the presentation of some of the other material. Since some of you are going to continue to take offense at this anyway, I’d like to point out that I write a comic strip in which violence (including killing) is presented in such a way that it is funny. This is difficult to do, but if you’re reading this, that’s because you read the comic, and (it may be assumed) you laugh. Why do you laugh?