April 14 2007

Well, there’s news this week gang.
This past Friday was, as you all know, Friday 13th, and a bunch of the boys thought it would be a good idea to hold a Lucky Friday 13th shooting competition. Iron sights only.
It seems that every contestant got one target that was tacked up one hundred yards from his shooting bench, and thirteen rounds, which he was to fire from his weapon. Fifteen yards behind his bench was his beer drinking point, manned by a volunteer who was prepared to measure him out thirteen pints of beer as the shooting match progressed.
The idea was to drink a pint, walk to the shooting bench, shoot a round at the hundred yard target, then walk back to the drinking point to drink a beer, and repeat the process until thirteen beers were drunk and thirteen shots were fired at the target.
The targets would then be scored and the winners declared.
On the face of it, the process seemed simple enough, but in practice it was anything but.
For the first five or six pints things went smoothly enough, but after that accuracy became a fugitive commodity. Among other things.
As the match wore on, men were returning to their firing point after downing a pint , to find a competitor trying to understand through the fog why he was no longer familiar with a weapon which in point of fact, was not his.
A couple of men, lined up their sights, took a deep breath, let it half way out, and then just fell asleep with their finger on the trigger.
This of course, was a disqualification, as was several instances of contestants who failed to hold down their thirteen pints of beer.
Crawling to the shooting line, or being assisted by well-wishers in getting there, knocked a few more out of the competition. And several shooters opened up the breeches of their weapons, left them on their shooting benches, and spent most of the match drinking their thirteen pints of beer at the drinking point, and observing most of the affair through a spotting scope.
Which wasn’t such a bad idea. The beer was donated by our friends at St. Arnold’s Brewery, and was, as usual, magnificent.
After the match was finally over, the judges went down range to retrieve the targets and found one target with only two holes in it, and another one that had twenty-nine holes in it. The one with twenty-nine holes in it had four different sized holes in it, but that figures.
It turned out that because of disqualifications, the winners target only had eight holes in it, but they were all the same size. He wasn’t available for comment because nobody could understand what he was saying at the time of this writing.
Obviously, it was a grand success enjoyed by all, and when someone pointed out that there was a Friday thirteenth in July, St. Arnold’s Brewery immediately volunteered to, once again, deliver the beer.
Yes, and we’re all looking forward to it too.

Till next week
Helga Biermeister
Secretary