Deploy the tomahawks!
The second season of The Terminal List — based on True Believer — will drop in a week. They just released a featurette on the effort to make the story feel authentic.
And a clip…
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Bryan Burrough is in the midst of the MeatEater podcast series The Gunfighters, based on his bestselling book exploring the way the Southern honor code, post-Civil War resentments and social dislocation, and access to fast-shooting, multi-shot revolvers combined to create to an explosion of violence in Texas with a blast radius that spread shrapnel across the West as Texans led the great herds to railheads for a burgeoning beef market.
The current episode is the first of a two-parter on John Wesley Hardin, the deadliest gunslinger of them all, whom Burrough rightly identifies as a disturbed serial killer.
Apparently, Burrough’s next work is on the Golden Age of Piracy. I am sure it will be a well-researched tale well told, but it will have to be very good indeed to displace Eric Jay Dolin’s Black Flags, Blue Waters or Angus Konstam’s The Pirate Menace on the top of the treasure chest. And Benerson Little’s The Sea Rover’s Practice and The Buccaneer’s Realm (pre-Golden Age) are key texts for anyone looking to dive deeper than the general history.
That said, it’s always good to have another telling of the pirate lore of the maritime frontier, especially from a tale-teller whose profile is as tall as Burrough’s.
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Blood Trails is back. Season 3/Ep 1 is a strange one — an unresolved disappearance from 1986.
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Hail, Rangers of the North!
Norway’s Jegerbataljonen GSV patrols the border between Norway and Russia. Conditions are exceedingly demanding — but man, what country!
The Border Rangers are conscripted soldiers. Norway also has some elite special forces units made up of volunteers, career soldiers.
The members of Norway’s top-tier Long Range Reconnaissance Squadron are among the fittest Rangers on the planet. The centerpiece of their fitness standard is a deceptively straightforward test:
Walk on a treadmill in full uniform with a 55-pound pack, carrying an eight-pound rifle for at least 25 minutes. Every five minutes after the 10-minute mark, an official raises the incline by 3%.
Oh, yeah… AND, the pace from beginning to end is mechanically set at 7 km/h (4.35 mph).
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Hard to believe that another Biathlon season is just around the corner — but here we are. The season gets underway with a fantastic urban biathlon event in Munich — the Loop One Festival. Yep — Oktober, Munich.
Quixotic Mainer says
I’m winding my way through the final wierd western Dark Tower release just now, but having Gunfighters and Blood Trails cached for afterwards will be great.
I like that full kit ruck workout, I’ll try an approximation of it. My cheapie treadmill only let’s me set a middling pace running wise, and would be better for marching. My goal this year is to get back to doing most of my running outdoors, if last year’s ice can be avoided.
Greg Austin Walker says
“A disturbed serial killer”?
Pray tell…are there then undisturbed serial killers?
Asking for a friend.
JimC says
Perhaps it could have been more precisely rendered as “a disturbed teenager and serial killer.”