Bazookas go "zook!" "zook!"

(The talk on sff.net somehow got around to bazookas . . . )

I don't know what they call them now, Dave, but when I was in the army (and got to shoot one round from one, at an abandoned car) they called the bazooka a "recoilless rifle," which is pretty uninspired. Accurate, though; you could see the barrel was rifled and it didn't have any recoil. The round I shot didn't have any explosive in it, either, but it bounced off the used car with an impressive "ploink."

("Pretend that car is a tank. Now shoot at it with this pretend high-explosive round. Okay; you're ready for combat.")

We didn't carry bazookas around in the jungle, thank god, because the enemy didn't have any tanks there, but one day we did take delivery, via helicopter, of a disposable one-shot recoilless. Our senior NCO, Royce, carried it around for a couple of days and said "This is ridiculous," and used it to shoot down a tree. A $1500 one-shot axe. But we did need the tree for overhead cover, so it wasn't a total waste.

If you did carry one around for personal protection, Dave, I think you would find that the concept of a "concealed weapon" can be interpreted very broadly.

The reading and talk at the MIT Museum went pretty well. Gay and I got there an hour early and walked around the museum pushing buttons and watching the cool displays – fun to do that every couple of years although the displays don't evolve very fast. The talking-head AI was improved over the last time. I didn't get to the slide-rule/personal calculator room, which is a fun time trip; have to drop by and revisit that. Anybody else here old enough to have had a bamboo Pickett?

(Used to be the mathematical equivalent of a fast-draw weapon. "All right, boy, what's the cube root of 377.933067?" "7.23?" "Close enough; I'll let you live.")

Nowadays my calculations are less precise. What is Jack going to do when the woman on the phone from Homeland Security asks him why he bought a sniper rifle in Des Moines last Thursday, when he was a couple of hundred miles away, even though the store's security camera shows a man who looks like him buying the weapon? I'm not sure what he says, but I guess I'll know tomorrow morning.

Joe