Telescopes don’t have a muzzle sticking out the front. If a high-magnification telescope has a smaller telescope to get pointed at the general area, it’s mounted on the side, not blocking part of the main lens. Most Maxims did have a smooth cylinder for the water jacket in the front half; the rear half is different, but it’s mostly hidden in this picture, and the grip is visible under the officer’s elbow.
If the current copyright system had been in effect earlier, Disney would have had to pay a fortune to the descendants of the Brothers Grimm – except that most likely he’d not have made those films, but would have hired someone to write “new fairy tales” with enough changes to avoid the copyrights. And our culture would be somewhat poorer for it.
I grew up in a small town with a huge state hospital (mental institution). “the Reagan administration shut down mental institutions and released the mentally ill into the streets” is not an accurate assessment of the situation. Reagan became President in 1981. They were closing wards and transferring severely schizophrenic patients to halfway houses by 1975. By the time Reagan was sworn in, the state hospital was shut down, 5,000 patients gone…somewhere.
It’s possible that this nationwide trend, like many fashionable bad ideas, began in California when Reagan was governor – but that wasn’t “the Reagan administration”, and he wasn’t responsible for the other 49 states. We were 2,000 miles from Sacramento.
Oates? As in Joyce Carol Oates, or Garfunkel and Oates?