The .500 Smith & Wesson is a beast!

A whole bunch of fans wrote to us, mostly in disbelief, about our .500 Smith & Wesson revolver.  Yes, it is our backup gun.

Why is such a powerful beast a backup, and not a primary gun?  Well, there are a few simple reasons:

1. It doesn’t hold enough cartridges.  We often need to fire a lot more than once, so having a gun that can only fire five is a bit of a turnoff.
2. It is far too powerful to shoot repeatedly as a primary sidearm.  If we miss, we’ve got to be able to fire again and again, and the gun is too powerful for accurate fast-repeat shots at a distance.  This alone means it absolutely can’t be used as our primary sidearm.  But, seeing as how a bug is probably going to be crawling on you by the time you need your backup gun, the .500 is perfect in a backup role.
3. Your backup gun absolutely, positively has to fire when you pull the trigger.  That means your backup gun has to be a revolver, which the .500 is.

We commonly refer to our .500 Smith as “The Staplegun,” because when its been used we’ve held it directly up to the bug’s head and pulled the trigger, like using a staplegun.  Only our gun is custom made by Smith & Wesson with a 1″ barrel (and we’re not telling if they made us buy 500 or not).

Also, some people couldn’t tell by the previously-posted photo how big the bullets for the .500 are, so here’s a bigger one below that hopefully demonstrates the sheer size and power of this cartridge!

From left to right: a standard-issue U.S. quarter, 9mm, .40 Smith & Wesson, .45 Auto, Dirty Harry's .44 magnum, and our .500 Smith & Wesson

A robot that eats people? Does that make it a vampire robot?

There’s an interesting story going around the Internet that a company has recently built a robot that powers itself by “eating” the dead.

The Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) project, developed by Robotic Technology Inc, is a real invention produced for the US military under DARPA.  It is simply a robot that can use organic fuel sources to power itself.

This is important because it means the robot can be sent on long-range missions without worry of running out of fuel.  By being able to pick up and “digest” twigs, leaves, and other organic matter the robot can sustain operations indefinitely.

According to the PR folks over at RTI, the EATR robot is a vegetarian and won’t eat dead people.  But really, if you made a robot that could eat dead people, would you tell the public you did?

Dr. James Polidori -- the man who made vampires foofy.

Vampire legends and tales date back to the Bible and before, sure.  But on April 10th, 1815, Mount Tambora on one of the Sunda islands in Indonesia erupted with a violence that hadn’t been seen in almost 1600 years.

The eruption was so powerful that it demolished villages all around, and sent up a global ash cloud that screwed up Earth’s climate so much that people in the northern hemisphere referred to the year 1816 as the year without summer.

In places like Geneva, for example, the summer was cold and rainy.  And people like Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley, her husband Percy Shelley, and their other friends had their Switzerland vacation dampened by the rain.  Bored one day, they decided to hold a horror story competition.  Mary wrote a story that eventually became known as Frankenstein.

What most people don’t know is that one of the guys there, Lord Byron, wrote a short story about a vampire.  He forgot about it, but his personal physician, Dr. John Polidori, picked it up and eventually published it as “The Vampyre” in 1819.

So what it breaks down to is that a bunch of bored Europeans couldn’t go swimming in 1816 because of the terrible weather induced by a volcanic eruption on the other side of the Earth, so they wrote the tales that became the classic backbones of modern horror fiction.

Not the non-fiction that is gruesome, dirty bugs, but the common Twilight, Anne Rice-type frilly fiction.  Where vampires wear medallions and know wine like James Bond.

And that, my friends, is how a volcano erupted vampires.

Yes, BOTH types of "bug" bites respond well to garlic paste.

Yes, this is going to be one of those posts where the term “bug” means both a vampire and some kind of insect.

When someone is suffering from a bug (vampire) wound, they experience discomfort for many reasons.  They feel an incredible itching sensation, and are compelled to scratch it.

One traditional remedy that helps a lot is to apply garlic paste to the wound.  No, this doesn’t mean garlic powder.  You have to slice the garlic very thin, and then squish every bit of garlic into a mash, much like the consistency of mayonaisse.

Garlic in any form will not repel vampires, no matter what the movies teach you.  The reason why garlic is tied with vampire bug bites is that garlic has some properties that relieve the pain victims feel after attacks.

And yes, if you apply garlic paste to a mosquito bite, it does help!  I’m sure some of the readers here could explain why better than I can, but let’s just say that if you’re bitten by *any* kind of bug, odds are garlic paste will help alleviate some of the irritating symptoms.

The Codex Sinaiticus

I’ve been all excited that the Codex Sinaiticus has finally gone online.  I’ve been waiting for this for months now.

And wouldn’t you know it?  The whole part about Othniel, the judge I was named after, isn’t online (Judges 3:7-11).  I don’t know yet if it’s part of the Codex that just wasn’t scanned, but it looks like that section has deteriorated to the point where it just doesn’t exist anymore.

The Codex is considered to be the oldest Christian Bible in existence.  I know for a fact there are earlier versions sitting in the Vatican, but for the rest of us regular folks, the Codex Sinaiticus works just fine.

I was really hoping there’d be some edited passages about me or something in there.  Maybe that Othniel was the baddest bug killer of all time.  Instead, I got mugatz.

Your cat is not a vampire's best friend.

Bugs hate cat urine.  No kidding.

How that was discovered isn’t entirely clear to me, but at some point in the 70′s my dad and his team found out that bugs really don’t like cat urine.

Now, before you go wearing the nasty stuff like some kind of protective perfume, please note that even if you’re dripping in the stuff, no bug is going to stop biting you once he gets a whiff of it.  When a bug is charging for a kill he’s not going to stop for anything, really… except maybe a good spear, or a claymore mine.

You need to significantly inundate the area around your home to make it any good.  I mean a whole lot of cat pee — so much so that you may decide to move away, too.

Also, before you go bugging the professionals for some synthetic feline tinkle, don’t bother.  Nobody makes enough of the stuff to make it worth your while.

I only mention this because I often find that the vampire lovers that write to me are also cat owners.  Just wanted to point out that no real vampire would be interested in living with cats.  I’d imagine it would be much like sharing a tent with a dude who loved beans, if you know what I mean.

This is a kid who has something to say. Be like him!

If you want to comment upon something I write, please feel free to do so.  I’ve gotten about six emails in the past two days with questions from people who noted that they didn’t want to take up precious USVS web space with their comments.

PLEASE — if you have a question or a comment, please leave it as a comment!  Two of you asked about the potentcy of the bug virus, two of you asked about the work we do on scene before we go hunting for bugs, and the other two of you asked other things.

Point being, if these were posted as comments somebody would have had their answer sooner.  And time is life in this business, okay?

I don’t care if you call me a jerk — if you have something to ask, say, or just blurt — comment it!

Closeup of the Ghent Altarpiece, showing Cain bashing out Abel's brains.

How far back in the history of man does vampirism go?  Well, in the Bible the story of Cain and Abel is in the fourth chapter of Genesis — the first book of the Bible.

That’s right, the first chapter was about the first theory of how creation began.  The second chapter was the second theory about how creation began.  The third was about how man was immortal and blessed and how woman screwed that all up.

And then it went immediately into fratricide, and the historic beginning of vampirism.  No shit.  A whole two chapters before he told Noah to split or get soaked, and about thirty-three chapters before Joey had his multicolored duster jacket.  Mind you, Moses doesn’t even show up until the next book of the Bible… and supposedly Moses *wrote* the Torah!

A stained glass from the cathedral in Milan, Italy showing Cain bashing Abel's brains out.

Cain and Abel are also mentioned in the Koran, by the way.  That’s how far back bugs go in human history, or at least religious history.

Cain was a farmer, and his younger brother Abel was a shepherd.  They both offered gifts to God, and He preferred sacrificed animals to vegetables.  God threatened Cain that he would be sinning if he didn’t offer the proper sacrifice.  So according to the Bible, Cain wasn’t offering the proper sacrifice (blood), something the English used against the Jews for centuries.

In the Koran, Abel points out to Cain that murder is wrong.

The story goes on that when Abel’s murder is discovered, God punishes Cain by forcing him to walk to Earth forever.  He is given a visible mark (the Mark of Cain) so that living beings know he is Cain, and that anyone who kills him will be punished far worse.

To quickly recap: the two biggest religions of the world, and one of the oldest, all agree that immediately at the beginning of human history:

• One man killed his brother, and,
• He was evil and clearly marked, and,
• He would live forever until murdered himself, AND,
• The man who killed him would be punished much worse

My team, and our teammates before us, have been searching for this fucker since he became popular.  If he is the literal granddaddy spreading undead fratricide upon the globe since the beginning of human history, we’re hoping the advent of the Internet, jet engines, and GPS will help us finally catch up to him and put two slugs in his forehead.

And if God is going to send me to Hell for doing so, well then, he may as well start turning up the heat now.

This is the S&W model 500 -- a cannon of a pistol.

Here at the USVS we carry quite an assortment of things that bugs don’t like.  We’ve got all types of machineguns, flamethrowers, heavy rifles, and other such weapons to help bugs sleep for good.

We’ve even got a really powerful sidearm in the Desert Eagle .41 magnum.

But when it gets down to the wire — the last stand, if you will — we need a gun that will absolutely, positively work every time we pull the trigger.  Likewise, we need a gun that can pour a whole lot of hate into a bug.  If it doesn’t we’re dead.

This is Dirty's Harry's wimpy little .44 magnum round (left) stacked up next to our .500 S&W! (right)

That’s why we use the Smith & Wesson model 500 as our backup pistol.  This beast of a wheelgun carries five rounds of ammo chambered in Smith’s own .500 S&W.  It’s one of the most powerful production pistols in the world and does an obscene amount of damage to the undead.

We customize ours by sawing down the barrel to about an inch or so long.  Sure, that hurts the accuracy of the gun, but if we have to use it the bugs are probably already chewing on our armor.  We like to think of these pistols as stapleguns on steroids — as you’re basically pushing the gun up to the bug’s head and pulling the trigger.

Check out the photos to the right and you can see why we’re happy to carry these beasts!

NAS Squantum, back when the Navy was in charge.

On May 24th, 1943, Special Projects Unit Cast was established at the Squantum Naval Air Station (NAS) in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Officially, the secret operation was for the testing of airborne radar systems, then still a relatively new technology.  The program was based out of M.I.T. in Cambridge, but because NAS Squantum was the nearest naval air field, the Quincy location became the home of all the actual in-flight testing of the technology.

It was also the official host of a government program that eventually came to be known as the United States Vampire Service.  That’s right, Quincy is home to two U.S. Presidents, the first Howard Johnsons, and a bug killing operation!

NAS Squantum was the perfect place to house the bug killers for many reasons.  First of all, it was a military base with tight security even for a hard target.  Secondly, nobody talked about what they did there due to the nature of the private programs, so it didn’t arouse suspicion when things were covered in tarps and moved around quietly.  Third, it was both an airport and a deep-port harbor, with easy access to major roadways.  The team could get to just about anywhere in the world without having to parade in front of civilians.

The USVS stayed at NAS Squantum even when SPU: Cast was disestablished in December of 1946, though it did eventually have to move for other reasons — one of which being the closing of NAS Squantum in 1953.