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> ...I wish I could get my hands on something Russian.
Have you seen inside an AK-47? I dislike guns in general but this guy at work has one and he opened it up for me. You like machines, you'd love it, it's such colorlessly clean design. There's a thingy in it having something to do with repeated shots that looks like a piece of coat-hanger wire. So he told me, in his U.S. Army-issue rifle the equivalent was two costly, interlocking, finely-machined parts. The coat-hang wire works better, even when the gun gets dirty it won't jam.
Regarding the industrial-revolution-hating French you may be right, probably you are I guess, but did you ever drive a Citroen DS-21? People say all kinds of things about the French, but as you say art equals technology, did you ever hear anyone accuse them of being anti-artistic? In particular I'd bet the French make the coolest most surrealistic machines-that-don't-work of any nation on the globe. Also I'd like to see a French nuclear power plant. I think I'd feel safer in one of their than in one of ours, and of course I'd never willingly go within a thousand feet of an English power reactor or twenty miles of a Russian one.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net