From the Knuckledragger’s Comments:
“Went to a wedding. Bride tossed the bouquet and women went nuts trying to get it. Groom fired off the garter, and the guys just moved out of the way, like the Red Sea parting.
“Several girlfriends were not amused. “
I saw the same thing once, when the band played a wedding. I later found out that most of the guys were divorced.
While reading through this report about how the recent spike in gun sales has affected the share prices of both S&W (+133%) and Ruger (+42%) — which is all good stuff, by the way — I spied at the bottom of the report this little snippet:
Moreover, on September 21, 2020, Breitbart News reported that ammunition sales were up 139 percent the first six months of 2020 as compared to the first six months of 2019, as Americans sought bullets and shotgun shells for the guns they were buying at a record pace.
A couple of days ago I went into Academy to check out the lay of the land with regard to their ammo stocks, and in a nutshell, they don’t have any. A few lonely boxes of .270 Win, .30-06 and some 6.5mm Creedmoor were all they had on the shelves. Forget any handgun ammo, and other than .22 CB (which are basically cartridges with no gunpowder in the cases, the bullets fired by the primer compound alone) and one (1) box of .22 Mag, there was no .22 ammo of any usable sort.
When I asked the counter guy when he was expecting a fresh shipment of ammo, he just shrugged.
So, Gentle Readers: whither National Ammo Day this Year?
I have to admit to mixed feelings about the whole thing. While the thought that Americans have basically bought all the spare ammo in the country should fill my heart with joy, it’s a fact that I can’t even perform a full-bore [sic] Happy Dance because I’d not be able to shoot my AK into the air à la some Iraqi wedding guest, having to count off the rounds like some Gun Powder Scrooge Of Ammo Day Present.
Even worse is that a cursory scrutiny of my favorite online ammo pushers’ websites reveals that not only are they out of stock of most ammo calibers, they aren’t even letting us know when the replacement stocks will arrive. And frankly, going to four different websites just to scrape up five boxes of 6.5x55mm to make the mandatory 100-round NAD minimum seems to be not worth the effort.
Here’s Lucky Gunner’s offering:
…and I’m not even going to talk about the per-trigger-squeeze cost… sheesh.
But I am going to talk about cost when it comes to .22 LR. Here are the only two options available from LG:
So much for the “7-cent solution”…
Fortunately, I’m not strapped for ammo (of any caliber) because well, you all know the reason. But National Ammo Day has always been a symbolic purchase — to remind the gun-confiscators and ammo-taxers that they face an uphill battle, so to speak.
But I think only a few complete idiots among this ungodly crowd will not have got the message this year.
So… is it worth the expense to buy .22 ammo at 18 cents per squeeze (instead of the usual 6-8 cents), just to make a point? Should we cancel National Ammo Day this year, not for lack of interest, but because of over-enthusiasm?
After I’d written the above, I thought to myself: why not get an obscure cartridge? They must have stocks of those. So I went to Midway to see about some .45-70 Govt, and found this:
None to be had, at any price. Ugh.
…that Amy Coney Barrett could have written on her pad while being interrogated grilled questioned by the Senate Democrats.
I’ll start the ball rolling:
Your suggestions in Comments.
Your suggestions in Comments.
I see with great regret that the peerless travel writer Bill Bryson is closing up his inkwell for good.
In an age when cheap airfares and package tours — not to mention online “visits” through media such as Gurgle maps and InstaGram — could have made travel writing about as relevant as toenail clippings, Bryson’s refreshing, no-nonsense style has defied the trend.
I first encountered the man through his Lost Continent: Travels In Small-Town America. I found in Bryson a kindred soul because at the time, Longtime Buddy Trevor Romain and I were doing very much the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale: once a year we would take a long weekend off work, pick a part of the U.S. that we’d never visited before, and fly in (he from Austin and I, at that time, from Chicago). Then we’d rent a car and set off, destination unknown and only the return flight’s departure time as a deadline. The Golden Rule: No Interstate Highways. Even major U.S. roads with only two digits (e.g. U.S. 30 or Route 66) were treated with suspicion, and we’d get off into the back country roads with alacrity.
We were often asked why we did this — and we did it for nearly a decade — and our reply was simple. We did it to remind ourselves why we had both left our country of birth and settled in this new, this wonderful and this dauntingly-large and diverse land.
To say that we met interesting people would rank among the great understatements of the century: in New Orleans, Queer Tom and Opera Kate (an out-of-work opera singer working as a barmaid); the lady in a little town outside Portland who collected frogs of all descriptions (stuffed, porcelain, wooden, whatever) and displayed them all in her restaurant; the huge guy in New Hampshire who, when we asked him if he’d ever played football lisped: “Nope. I got weak kneeth”; and the slightly-batty breakfast diner owner in Rhode Island who wore the most eccentric earrings we’d ever seen, a different pair every single day; these, and many, many others were encountered in our travels, and gave us both dinner-party conversation topics and “Remember when?” reminiscences that survive to this day.
And during every single trip, Trevor and I fell in love with America all over again.
So when reading Bill Bryson’s books, it was like reading about one of our own “Blue Highways” trips (the name taken from the title of William Least Heat Moon’s book of the same ilk). And when Bryson settled in Britishland, it gave rise to works like the astonishing The Road To Little Dribbling and Notes From A Small Island — books which, because I’d been to the U.K. often myself, made me nod my head because I too had been to Little Dribbling, only it was called Upton-Under-Wold, Thirsk or Lesser Foldem.
I cannot recommend his work highly enough, because he is an extraordinary writer who sees everything through a pair of clear-sighted lenses and not rose-tinted ones. Never one to suffer fools or stupid things, he still talks about them with affection covered by incredulity. If you’re looking for a reading project for the winter, you could do a lot worse than read everything Bill Bryson has ever written.
And Bill: good for you. While I am distraught at your retirement, I am forever grateful to you and your wonderful works.
As to why he’s getting out:
“I would quite like to spend the part that is left to me doing all the things I’ve not been able to do. Like enjoying my family, I have masses of grandchildren and I would love to spend more time with them just down on the floor.”
I can think of no better reason. Give them each a hug from me.
Let’s see: because #feminismrules, you assign a female guard to an all-men’s prison. What could possibly go wrong?
Lauren McIntyre, 32, is accused of having a sexual relationship with convicted double murderer Andrew Roberts over a four-month period at HMP Isle of Wight, Metro reported.
Prison guard McIntyre — believed to be a mother-of-two— is accused of willfully and without reasonable excuse or justification misconducting herself in a way which amounted to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder because she had secret sex with murderer Roberts.
And the choirboy?
Roberts was convicted of strangling girlfriend Louise L’Homme, 23, and their eight-month-old daughter at the home they shared in 2003. He is serving a life term in prison.
This is what happens when you mix men and women together in a closed environment. (And for the benefit of the dense: whether it’s in a prison, a co-ed campus dormitory or on board a Navy ship, they’re gonna have sex.) ‘Twas ever thus, and no amount of Feministical Theory or Woeful Handwringing will prevent it.
In the old days, prison guards were called “screws”. Nowadays, that nickname seems to have a whole different meaning, dunnit?