Way out West there was this fella — fella I wanna tell ya about. Fella by the name of the Backyard Scientist. At least that was the handle his loving parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. The Backyard Scientist, he called himself the Backyard Scientist. Now, the Backyard Scientist — he didn’t make a whole lot of sense. And a lot about where he lived, likewise.
Lots of static recently on these here Intertunnels about printing a gun with a 3D printer. Whoopty. Of course a cursory search of any encyclopedia from half a century ago under “zip guns” will clue you in on the fact that just about anybody can make something that fires a bullet, and do it with nothing more than the contents of a kitchen junk drawer.
This guy is the model of the thoroughly Modern Man, not some version of Morris Moss standing in line at a Staples trying to buy a boatload of 3D printer ink. He started out small, just making a laptop killer after a cursory trip down two aisles in a Home Depot, but I imagine he’ll be making a phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range out of a garage door opener and a toaster pretty soon.But for now, Just what you see, pal.
(A little coarse language)
Ah, farm country. You can stuff 84 times the manufacturer’s recommended maximum charge of tannerite into your buddy’s old beater and let rip. It’s like Hunter S. Thompson is your wedding planner.
No livestock were discommoded by this explosion. What happens to the livestock when all the beer has been consumed is none of anyone’s business. What happens in Podunk, stays in Podunk.
The Vice Channel sends out a semi-intrepid reporter to the Big Sandy Shoot in Arizona.
Vice tries to cultivate a wild and crazy image about themselves. But considered dispassionately, they’re the real squares, doing real reporting. Interesting and compelling things are going on in the world, and they go and look at them and report what they’ve seen. That’s what reporting is, or at least what it used to be. No other news organization I know of would have used that gathering as anything but a pretext for a camouflaged editorial.
By being a kneejerk oppositionist, any other reporter would have missed out on discovering that shooting big guns is fun, and interesting, and the people that do it in Arizona seem like pleasant, friendly, and avuncular folks.