By Philip Bourjaily

Patterning shotguns is drudge work, although I have to admit getting a certainly geeky enjoyment out of counting the pellet holes in paper. The more you pattern guns, the more you wonder how it is we kill things and break targets so consistently with a shotgun. Like snowflakes and thumbprints, no two patterns are alike, and all of them have gaps. The perfect “even” pattern, with pellet strikes distributed across regular intervals, simply doesn’t exist.

By Philip Bourjaily

Dave often cautions us not leave our variable scopes set on the highest magnification when we’re hunting. That way, if we have an unexpected close call with a buck as we sneak through the woods, we’ll have a better target than a patch of blurry hair, which is all you see when you look at a deer 10 yards away through a 9x scope.

By Philip Bourjaily

While I clean up the virtual blood covering the floors and walls of my office in the aftermath of the Gun Nut Bad Capstick Parody Contest let me hand the blog over to my older son. Gordon, who discovered and devoured my Capstick collection as a fifth-grader. He read all the entries and came up with a winner. Here are his thoughts:

Bad prose is always a joy to read, and doubly so when the reading brings back fond memories of lazy summer days spent poring over PHC's glib and gory writing.

Honorable mentions:* Fellow Iowegian iowaboy gets major props from me for his truly inspired tale of squirrel hunting (and the buggy whips simile is great). Mesarich's almost Hemingway-esque contribution had me howling in laughter, although it's a little too reserved to be Capstick, and Dotcomaphobe's splatterfest of a post packed a wallop of understatement.

Here are the top three:
TM's post is a good Capstick caricature, picking up on the man's proclivity for delightfully tacky analogies, the excessive gore, the loving descriptions of Africa's delightful miseries, and the obligatory .416 Rigby:

By David E. Petzal

Back in 1968, the first Howa rifles were imported from Japan under the name Golden Bear. The magazine for which I worked assigned a writer to review one, the article he wrote was such an over-the-top rave that I called him.

“Just between us,” I said, “they aren’t really that good, are they?”

“Just between us,” he said, “they’re better.”

And that is why, when Roy Weatherby looked for a manufacturer to build affordable rifles with his name on them, he picked Howa. And nothing has changed since.

What attracted me to this particular Vanguard was its resemblance to an Ed Brown Ozark, a model which I believe he no longer makes. I was lucky enough to get hold of one a few years ago. It is a 7mm/08 with a 20-inch #3 contour barrel and a weight of 8 ½ pounds with scope. The rifle is not only very accurate, but has almost no recoil, and is a pure pleasure to shoot.