This is the factory-made Mac-10. Ours look a lot different.

You know how in the movie Roadhouse people repeatedly say to Dalton, “I thought you’d be taller?”  Well perhaps the most frequent comment we get from older military guys has to do with our hoses, or our Mac-10 “hose” submachineguns.  Anybody with experience firing and maintaining a Mac-10 says something like, “Your guns must jam a lot.”

Well yes, factory-standard Mac-10′s do like to jam a lot.  In fact, when our team was first offered a modified Mac-10 as our primary weapon, there was much laughing involved.  A jammed gun means we get eaten by the bad guys.  We laughed quite a bit at this poor sales rep who brought this new invention based on an outdated gun with a bad reputation.

Then one of our guys test fired it, and everyone shut up.

You see, our Mac-10′s aren’t factory-standard.  They may resemble the stamped metal Mac-10′s from over forty years ago, but each one is modern and hand-built.  The insides have completely different guts, and employ such crazy things as glass and ceramics.  You’d think glass and ceramic materials would be too fragile for such a weapon, but these technologies can easily handle the workload.  In fact, not only do our guns rarely jam, the cyclic rates are increased over the factory models.

Check out this dated video to see the factory model Mac-10 (and Mac-11).  Now imagine ours having over three times as many bullets, a forward firing handle (so you can fire it with your front or back hand), and a suppressor that makes the thing awfully quiet.

For a better idea of how many rounds these hoses throw downrange, check out this video from the madman Dmitri over at FPSRussia — he’s firing two Mac-10′s at the same time.

We darnk a LOT of beer at Stonehenge.

The crew and I stumbled home to our hotel in Salisbury tonight after having a great time at a place called the Haunch of Venison.  That’s right – the polite English way of saying a deer’s butt.

The place is hundreds of years old.  We had our good friend Father Padraig from the Knock Shrine flown in to join us.  He knew quite a bit about the history of Salisbury, and shared some rumors about the pub as well.  Supposedly, centuries ago the pub was used as a brothel, and a tunnel was dug between it and St. Thomas a Becket church so that the priests could visit privately.  We ate quite well and drank a lot of beer and spirits in a place they call the Horse Box, which is a smaller bar in the building.  It’s got a pewter bar top!  Rumor is that Ike and some of his WW2 masterminds used to meet there.

If you’re ever in Salisbury, you’ve got to check this place out!  And if you don’t know much about Salisbury, you should check out the book Sarum, by Edward Rutherfurd.  It’s a brilliant read, and even I read the whole thing while on duty here at Stonehenge this last week or so.

Which brings me to why I was there — the team and I just finished a job at Stonehenge.  You know, that big circle of rocks north of Salisbury in the UK?  We were called out there because some archaeologists have some new ideas about this oval-shaped area they call a Cursus just north of the Stonehenge monuments, and we were brought in to provide undead protection.  That’s right – undead protection.  We were hired to be like rent-a-cops or movie shoot medics in case the Indiana Jones-type gravediggers discovered something that wasn’t done moving after years of being dead.  This isn’t the first time we’ve worked Stonehenge.  In fact, in the last couple of years we’ve pulled similar duty on other digs.  Just scroll through this blog and you’ll see at least one.  The thing about this one that was silly is that although Stonehenge is believed to be a burial site for perhaps thousands of people, they were all supposedly cremated first.  Which means that even if they were vampires when they were finally taken out, the cremation process would have finished the job.

I pointed this out when we were called the last time, but no, the Federal Powers That Be required us to go for diplomatic reasons.  It makes it look like the US is playing nice with the UK.  Because you know how our two countries have had trouble getting along since the War of 1812.

Just thought you’d all like to know how your tax dollars are being spent.  Oh, and if you’re ever in Salisbury, make sure you visit the Haunch of Venison — it rocks.

The King of Pop was probably undead long before Edward Cullen even hung around vampires.

In the Twilight series, the main character, Edward Cullen, hides his immortality by pretending to be a high school student in Washington state.  He was born in 1901, which makes him 104  years old by the time the first book was published in 2005.

That’s right — a man, after 104 years of life, decides he should stay in high school.  I’d blast my brains out before I had to go back to high school.  Eddie Cullen is a millionaire, or at least should be a millionaire given that time is in his favor.  He could easily claim he’s the grandson of the owner of a big company and work in the mail room.  He could pretend to be a spoiled trust fund baby.  He has many options, yet he chooses to surround himself with underage children.

He’s a pedophile.

Care to argue it?  He falls in love with Bella, who is a teenager, and he’s almost 90 years older than her.  Technically it’s probably not illegal in Washington state.  According to Washington State law, Cullen probably didn’t break any laws.  But if he had sex with her in Arizona, where Bella had just moved from, at exactly the same time he was banging her in Washington, then yes, he’d be in jail.

Best case scenario, Cullen is a creep.  Anything less than that, he’d be doing time at Big Joe Arpaio’s tent city jail.

Whatever the hell this is, it is not a vampire.

No, Nick Cage is not a vampire.

Some idiot is trying to sell a photo on eBay. He claims it’s over 140 years old, and is authentic. And it apparently looks like Nick Cage. Which is apparently because Nick Cage is over 140 years old and is a vampire, or so he suggests.

Sure, it does look a lot like Nick Cage. But there are significant problems with this whole auction. First, it looks like Nick Cage’s face was photoshopped in. Nick is looking straight while the person sitting down is looking to their right. Secondly, it seems sketchy, and the auction has already been taken down.

But before all of this drivel, no vampire sits down in a freaking tuxedo and smiles for a camera. Vampires eat people just like you eat a hamburger. Do you sit down and let a cow take your photo before you eat it? Do you then put on plays on the farm to entertain the cows for 100 years to lull them into a false sense of security?

No, vampires eat people without even making eye contact.

So no, that is not an 140-year-old Nick Cage. It may be a photoshopped version of Nick Cage, but he isn’t a vampire.

This is a Crust Job. No matter what happens, these bones won't do anything but rattle a bit.

So the team just got back from Kerrville, Texas for what we call a Crust Job.  You see, some laborers on a construction site discovered some bones that didn’t want to stop moving, similar to a gig we had in Israel a few months back.

We went down there and removed the body.  The whole job took about five minutes.  But because of the nature of the gig, we had to hang out for a few days in case anything else started moving.

The third night at the hotel the guys and I were matching “Man v. Food” on the Travel Channel, and wouldn’t you know it, they were featuring the huge pizzas at Big Lou’s in San Antonio, which was only a few miles from our hotel!  So seven of us big and hungry men climbed into our trucks and headed down Route 13.

Yes, it's well over 3 feet wide!

The first thing we noticed?  You’ve gotta wait.  The place is busy as all get-out.  So I put the company plastic on the bar and half of us get seats while the bartender pours what they call Big Ass beers.  Precisely the type of refreshment bug killers prefer.  We’re all on our second when the maitre d, or maitre e, or even the maitre f (it was THAT busy) brings us over to our table and the food starts coming.

They ask you to order your food before you sit down, and seeing as how we were all pretty hungry, we’d ordered a bunch of appetizers.  They start bringing out brisket pizza wraps and garlic bread and wings.  The table gets heaped with food, even including Larry’s huge salad, and it probably should have been enough to fill us up.

THEN comes the M.O.A.P. — the Mother Of All Pizzas!  The 42″ loaded pie that the owner claims weighed about 30 pounds, and I believe him!  Each slice is almost two feet long!  You need two plates to hold just one *thin* slice of this dinosaur slab.

Needless to say, we barely finished it, and nobody on the team had dessert.  It was a quiet ride home and everybody went right to bed.  It was easily the best pizza dining experience I’d ever had in the south, and I’m embarrassed to admit that if I hadn’t had six other guys with me, I’d have never been able to even scratch that gigantic pizza!

This is a quiet night for a Mong Kok market.

The past weekend marked the 12th anniversary of a pretty nasty bug attack in the Mong Kok area of Hong Kong.

Mong Kok is the most densely populated place in the world.  Located on the Kowloon Peninsula on the island of Hong Kong, just off the coast of China, the area boasts a population density of about 130,000 people per square kilometer.  By comparison, Manhattan only has about 26,000 people per square kilometer.

Only a handful of months after the People’s Republic of China took Hong Kong back over, a Chinese government vampire hunting group ran into a few bugs in a tunnel under the Ladies Market of Mong Kok.  Had the bugs stayed underground the problem may have been small, but unfortunately, the bugs got startled and ran to the surface.

It was Saturday, October 11th, at about 9pm at night.  At that time of night, Tung Choi street is a mob scene.  The bugs burst into perhaps the most densely-packed crowd on Earth that night, and ravaged brutal swaths through the shoppers as they fled.  Since bugs tend to be much faster and stronger than regular people, they tore their way through the panicked crowds, creating even more damage as people trampled each other in fear.

An estimated 7 people were killed by the bugs due to trauma, with an additional 34 succumbing to trauma from trampling.

To make matters worse, there was a H5N1 bird flu scare in Hong Kong at that time.  Due to fears the new Chinese government would simply euthanize anyone afflicted with a contagious disease, many of the people injured in the attack that night stayed at home and didn’t report their injuries.  And, as one would guess, many of these injured people developed all different types of infections.  As many people in Mong Kok tend to live in incredibly overcrowded apartments, these diseases and infections spread rapidly, and within days a huge outbreak of bug attacks hit.

And, like the Chinese government tends to do, it attempted to hide the whole thing.

Needless to say, the area was finally locked down, with hundreds of people treated by military field hospitals.  Countless others were removed from the area and transported to “special hospitals,” though none of them were ever seen again.

Of course, the Chinese government denies all of this to this day.

A common RFID "chip."

A guy wrote to me recently asking how we can walk into a town, potentially make quite a big mess, and then leave without leaving a thing behind.  It’s a great question.  I answered with four simple letters:

RFID.

Radio Frequency IDentification is a technology that uses little metallic stickers to keep track of things.  You see a watered-down version of RFID technology more commonly these days in stores as security devices, where an alarm goes off if you try to leave the store without having the sticker or tag neutralized.

Real RFID technology involves a receiver keeping track of all the RFID stickers in the area.  So, for example, you could put RFID stickers on all of your DVD or Blu-Ray discs.  When someone takes one out of your house, the receiver notices the disc is missing, and can alert you.  Likewise, when your friend returns it, the system will let you know the disc is back in your house.

We put RFID tags on all of our equipment.  In addition to the sticker-type tags, we’ve got some pretty tough plastic ones that we have sewn into our gear.  We then have receivers built into all of our trucks.  If I accidentally leave a glove somewhere, my truck lets me know that I left it behind, and keeps bugging me until I go back and get it.

Sure, it’s a smart technology, but it’s not space age by any means.  Ford announced at the beginning of last year it was going to put RFID tracking technology into its trucks, and stores across the country have been using it for years.

So no, we’re not invisible nor are we ghosts.  We’re just meticulous about staying out of the public eye, and picking up after ourselves.

God bless the girls of the IDF. Yes, these are real soldiers that walk the streets of Israel!

A few of us are enjoying being back in the sand this week to look at a wall.   You heard that right, we were flown over in this late-night rush like the world was on fire to look at… a wall.

Archaeologists have discovered this ancient, massive wall under the City of David here in Jerusalem.  They’re all impressed because this 25-foot-high wall is made of huge stone blocks and suggests there was a giant fortress and blah blah blah.

They called us over because vampirism is as old as dirt, and since nobody is quite sure if vampires actually die of anything but a blow to the brain, we’re brought in just in case one of the old and crusty piles of bones starts walking again.  Well, they don’t quite walk.  They don’t really do much of anything, really.  But when one is clearly moving, even though it’s just a little bit, it’s bad for business.

Needless to say we’re getting paid big bucks to be on hand should something pop up.  We’re staying at a pretty swanky hotel checking out some of the hottest women in the world (think Bar Refaeli, as this is her home country), all in case a skull chatters a little bit and they need someone to come in and step on its head.

Sometimes I love my job.

Before he became Homer Hickam's hero, Wernher von Braun was a major in the Waffen-SS.

As World War II was wrapping up in Europe, some of the big wigs at the War Department felt that the U.S. should take active steps to bring German intelligence and research to the U.S.

They were more worried that German scientists and intelligence would fall into Russian hands, and wanted to get them on U.S. soil before the Russians got them.

So on July 6, 1945 the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved Operation Overcast.  The original official logic was these minds would help save the lives of U.S. soldiers still fighting in the Pacific.  The program, however, went on for many years long after VJ Day.

When the security of the operation was compromised, the name of it was changed to Operation Paperclip.  The new name came from the practice in the War Department of adding “new” backgrounds and histories to the folders of Nazis.  You see, President Roosevelt initially said he didn’t want any Nazis or war criminals allowed in the program.  To get around this, the War Department would change, or “bleach,” the files of potential participants to remove any information proving them to be Nazis or war criminals.

These new fradulent documents were paperclipped onto the file folders, hence the new name for the operation.

I bring this whole topic up because not that long ago we had to deal with one of these Paperclip Nazis.  He had been “rescued” at the end of World War II because of his extensive knowledge of vampirism.  Unfortunately for a few guys, he was always a Nazi first, and even 60 years later, he chose Hitler over humanity.

Eugene Schueller - lipstick genius and Nazi-lover.

Leading up to WWII, there were a bunch of people around the world who hated Jews, and to be fair, really hated everyone that didn’t consider themselves of a superior race.  Very similar to hate groups of today, such as the KKK in the U.S., Kach in Israel, and ALIR/ex-FAR of Rwanda, these people loved fascism, and hated Jewish folk.

So it was no surprise that there were pro-fascist groups in France leading up to, and during, the second world war.  Plenty of French people during the Vichy years marched Jews onto trains knowing full-well they were going to extermination camps.

What most people don’t know is that Eugene Schueller, the founder of French cosmetics company L’Oreal, was one of these people.

That’s right, the guy who founded the biggest cosmetics company in the world also founded the biggest pro-fascism, anti-Semitic group in France leading into WWII – The Cagoulards.  He supported terrorism, and actively funded efforts that included blowing up synagogues, and supplying explosives and guns for French terrorists.

Why do I mention this?  Well some of these same guys also funded a French research group that experimented with using “vampirism.”  By that I mean they infected and killed countless innocent people to learn more about the virus; with every intention of exploring the use of it as a weapon.

These guys supported the Nazis, terror, hate, and genocide.  They’ve also recently screwed with my team.  Think about that the next time you put on your lipstick.