Life of Note: Mikhail Kalashnikov

The Saturday Dom runs a weekly obit page on lives of note and there's some really interesting stuff on people who had an influence on history, no less so than did Major General Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK47 assault rifle, who died age 94, couple of days before Xmas.
Its estimated 70 million of the Avtomat Kalashnikov 1947 model (I guess avtomat is Russian for automatic),  were made, excluding copies produced in third-world backstreet workshops. 7.62mm carbine, it can fire 600 rounds per minute, accurate to 300 metres, still lethal at 1500 metres, reputed as robust, lightweight, easy to maintain, operable in environments ranging the full gamut from sand to mud, less sensitive than the American M16, and more reliable than most British counterparts, continuing to operate when most others would jam.
Kalashnikov was born in Khazakstan, a 17th child of a peasant family, went to work on the Turkistan-Siberian railway on leaving school, and on call-up for military service in 1938, trained as a tank driver, then a tank commander, seriously wounded in the 1941 Battle of Byansk, (a stand-off southwest of Moscow where two Panzer divisions surrounded the 50th Army, who managed to extricate without much actual fighting, despite a huge toll of 80,000 killed and 50,000 taken prisoner as a result of the artillery and air bombardment), brooding on the superiority of German weapons, he conceived the idea of making a simple weapon for soldiers "that dont go to university", and built the prototype while recovering at the railway workshops, all with hand tools.
On later posting to the Emsk small-arms proving ground he developed the final version, which became the chosen standard weapon for the Soviet army, but given the 1947 date, never saw active usage in WWII. The pity of it all, and much to Kalashnikov's disappointment, the rifle went on to become the weapon of choice for anybody but the good, was probably responsible for killing most of the Russians killed during the Afghanistan occupation, and the Chechen uprising. Asked at a press conference how he felt about inventing a weapon that had killed more people than the Hiroshima bomb, he replied he'd received a lot of negative letters but still slept well. "Weapons are not to blame when used illegally," he replied. "the ones to blame are the politicians, not the designers."
Anywhere other than Russia, Kalashnikov would have become a multi-millionaire for his invention, instead he got honours heaped on him by Moscow, Hero of the Socialist Labour, Stalin Prize, Lenin Prize, a doctorate in engineering, 3 Orders of Lenin, Order of the Red Banner, and at age 75, Yeltsin promoted him to Major-General.
Ironically, he became a friend of Eugene Stoner, the inventor who made a fortune from his M16 rifle, who gave him more than a taste of the lavish hospitality he missed out on.
A lot of people would condemn the invention of such a weapon, but you couldnt deny the influence the man had on history.

Book: Never Go Back; Lee Child

I'm so hooked on Lee Child and Jack Reacher, he has to be my all time favorite read.
This one I started at 10.30pm to go to sleep on, only I roared through it to the end without the sleep.
11 out of 10!

Book: Leighton Smith; Beyond the Microphone

LOL...
Leighton says something like, with the growth of social media, people make a heap of sharp comment that isn't worth reading, none more so than book reviews, so what can I say?
Well, for starters I did enjoy this book. You couldn't say it was high literature, but given his lengthy career in radio, it was a nostalgic commentary of our times, and although I've only been a sporadic listener to his morning talk-back only recent years, its the only talk-back I can be bothered listening to.
Why?
I think I get educated by listening, the others are just a load of petty proletariat gripings and platforms for talk-show hosts to mouth their own less educated and formed, and sometimes nasty, opinions. You can chuck sports-talk into this category as well. No search for a solution, most times I'm made to feel better off than any caller, so the ills of the world are all my fault.
In his book Leighton details what amounts to a good life.
He's earned it.
A 5 out of 5 read for me.

Book: Gavin Menzies "Who Discovered America"

Interesting read, maintaining Chinese colonised America by sea, plenty of evidence, DNA and archaeology, they were there about the right time.
Major plank being the land bridge from Asia theory is shot full of holes, who'd want to tramp 1000's of miles across snow and ice, no local food source to sustain the journey.
But my question from the outset was, no reason why planet Earth might'nt have been a lot warmer at odd times past, permitting shorter sea crossings and more land based migration.
And neither is there much evidence today of the supposed Chinese shipping armada, although I had a cousin researched building himself an ocean-going steel boat, and after pretty thorough research came up with the chinese junk being the most sea-worthy, easiest built and rigged, one-man sailed model.
So who knows. The ancients were no less clever than we are today.
Who can say what civilisations were swept away by natural catastrophe.