Tag: Things that totally suck

Excuses, Excuses

Health

Whenever I get these upper-respiratory infections (about every nine months or so, it seems), the physical ailments (hacking cough, wheezing, nasal clogging etc.) are bad, but what really screws me up is the physical and mental lassitude that occurs not only during the illness, but persists for days and days thereafter.

Hence the paucity and dare I say crappy quality of the posts over the past couple of weeks, for which I am truly sorry.

It’s not only that:  to give you another example, my half-dozen per-month range visits have dwindled, in the past couple of weeks, to zero.  I think I’m going to get a call from Texas Legends any day now, asking if I’m okay.

I don’t even have the energy to drive over to pick up Rx refills from the drugstore, even though the on-hand supplies are dwindling fast.

We had dinner at Doc Russia’s place last Sunday night — our first dinner together in ages.  Normally, our dinners last well into the night, involving much food, drink, conversation and general merrymaking.  This time, after barely a couple of hours, I had to call it quits, an indecently-short time after dinner.  Never had a drop to drink, either.

All of which is my way of saying that this website has sucked over the past couple of weeks, and I know it.

I’m slowly — far too slowly — starting to get better, proof of which is that I actually took out the range bag yesterday and loaded it up with ammo for some testing I’ve been meaning to do.  (In case you’re curious:  the difference in felt recoil between .357 Mag, .38 +P and regular .38 Special loads across a couple-three revolvers of different brand and barrel lengths.)

I don’t know if I’ll make it to the range today — I really have to get those meds refilled, and I’m not sure I have the energy for two trips.  Following my semi-annual visit to the eyedoc two days ago, I also need to get new lenses for my failing eyesight;  fuck knows when I’m going to get round to that, but I really need to be able to read things like street signs and such.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to unload all this shit on you;  but you, my Loyal Readers, deserve some explanations for the website suckage of the past couple of weeks:  and there they are.

I’ll be posting at intervals over the next few days as the energy provides, just not in a five-minute post-midnight tranche as usual.  Bear with me.

Product Consolidation

Corporate Fuckery, Finance, The Gun Thing

…as Ruger might call it, or as others (like myself) might call it: “heritage destruction”.

Ruger officials confirmed industry chatter this week that it would immediately stop producing four models, while it will halt production of several others at the end of the year. 

Production of four revolver lines – some going back to 1958 – would be suspended, effective immediately: 

    • LCR
    • SP101
    • GP100
    • Bearcat

On Tuesday, the company announced changes to several current-generation product families as part of its ongoing Ruger 2030 strategy.

“These decisions reflect our review of consumer demand, evolving market preferences, manufacturing complexity and the long-term profitability of each product family,” Abbey Clary, Ruger’s director of media, advertising and public relations, told Guns.com in an email. “The goal is to focus our resources on the products consumers want most today while creating capacity for future product development and manufacturing modernization.”

I leave it to y’all to decide what Clary really means with the above corporate wafflespeak, but a decent summary might be:  “If you ain’t gonna buy ’em, we ain’t gonna make ’em”.

Fair enough.  Revolvers, and the people who love shooting them, are clearly a dying market (literally, in the latter case).

But the good news doesn’t end there, oh no.

A larger group of products are nearing suspension, with their final planned production runs through the remainder of 2026. They include:

    • SR1911
    • LC Carbine
    • PC Charger
    • PC Carbine
    • LC Charger
    • Redhawk
    • Super Redhawk
    • Blackhawk
    • Super Blackhawk
    • Single-Series (Six- and Nine) revolvers
    • Vaquero
    • Ruger No. 1
    • 77-Series rifles
    • Hawkeye
    • Ruger Precision Rifle

…leaving one to ask, as the article does, well what the fuck is left?

Rifles:

  • Mini-14 rifle
  • Ruger 10/22
  • Ruger American Rifle
  • Harrier series AR-15s

Pistols:

  • LCP Security 380 and Security 9
  • RXM
  • MAX-9
  • Ruger 57
  • 22 Charger
  • Mark IV

How nice of them to leave us with at least the 10/22 and Mark IV.

Ruger are quitting the 1911 market (probably because their offerings sucked green donkey dicks, so no great loss there), and ditto the “precision” rifle market (because people who do precision rifle shooting generally go for higher-quality platforms like Bergara, Howa and Sako, while for the budget-conscious, there’s always Savage).

Oh, and the relaunch of the excellent Red Label shotguns is irrelevant, because Ruger’s outsourcing the production thereof to Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing (CSMC) so it’s just a label on someone else’s gun.  I suppose we should be glad that they’re using an American gunmaker instead of some backyard Turkish suppliers.

As a one-time corporate marketing puke myself, I can understand why Ruger is doing this.

As a lifelong gun enthusiast — and a lifelong Ruger buyer — I’m feeling nothing but gloom and despair.

It makes all sorts of sense, financially speaking;  but the joy of shooting Ruger’s incomparable revolvers has just left the building, after kicking people like me in the mouth.

I’m not sure I’ll ever buy a Ruger product again.

Bad Math, Bad Service

Food & Drink

Let’s wander off into yet another debate about tipping (“gratuities” WTF).

Here’s something that should make everyone’s ears prick up:

A Texas Roadhouse customer has reignited the tipping debate after spotting a major issue with the automated calculation.

Recording the clip from his table as he zoomed in on the payment machine, he explained: “I’m at Texas Roadhouse, is my math off?  Because 20 percent of $66 is not fucking $16.”

The receipt on the screen showed that his order had come to $66.66.  He had then selected the standard 20 percent tipping option which showed added $16.28, rather than the expected $13.33, to take his total up to $82.94.

And the unexpected $2.95 extra left the content creator scratching his head.  He wrote a simple caption that read: “What’s going on here Texas Roadhouse?”

I never ever use the auto-tip function when paying for a meal, simply because I have no control over what happens to the tip amount — supposedly given to the server, but all too often either partially- or wholly pocketed by the manager, or shared with the other restaurant staff.

Sorry, but I’m only interested in tipping the waiter or waitress (“server” WTF) a decent amount when the service has been exemplary.  And I pay cash directly into the waiter’s hand so that he gets to keep all of it.

On a parallel theme, this one about the so-called “Texas” Roadhouse chain.

I say “Texas” because the parent company is based in Kansas, not Texas, and as with all chains, your experience in them will vary greatly depending on where you are.

Clutching our TR gift card in hand (thankee friend for the gift), New Wife and I once went to the one nearest our home for a free meal, and the whole experience was excellent:  food served hot and in good time, great service, friendly waitress and so on.

So when we found ourselves out of town a little while ago and had few (okay, two) choices for “out” food, we picked the local Texas Roadhouse largely because of our previous meal at the other one.

Oy.  We should have gone to the IHOP.

Nearly an hour’s wait*, indifferent service — food arrived late, order incomplete and the frozen margeritas which arrived midway through the meal, and only after a reminder to the waiter… and let me not even speak of the unbelievable noise in the place.

Okay, let me speak of the unbelievable noise in the place.  Since when did the celebration of a birthday or other special occasion become something that involves the entire fucking restaurant?  Loud, raucous singing of “Happy Birthday” accompanied by hammering on tables and thereafter much joyous screaming:  I’ve had quieter times at an indoor shooting range.  And by the way, all this happened over a backdrop of thunderous, earsplitting Nashville-style country music and the usual shouting of the other patrons.  (From the movie The Long Riders  comes the memorable Cole Younger quote:  “Texans sure are loud!”)

And I had no hearing protection, either, although I should have.

So when confronted by the auto-tip thing on the table-top electronic menu thing (no paper menus WTF), I promptly hit the “0%” button, and we walked out without leaving any kind of tip to the waiter whatsoever.  (In his defense, I should mention that most of his time was spent chatting up one of the waitresses:  a far more pleasurable activity than, you know, serving customers.)

So file my next visit to Texas Roadhouse under “NEVER”.

*In the normal course of events, we never wait longer than a few minutes to be seated, at any restaurant because frankly, no food — no matter how apparently special — will be worth the wait. When we arrive at a restaurant and are told the wait will be more than five minutes, we leave and find somewhere else.

That we had been forced by circumstance to wait for nearly an hour at Texas Roadhouse before being subjected to the horrorshow as described above just made us all the angrier.

Once Again, A Simple Solution

Government Thugs, Rights, The Gun Thing, Two-Minute Hate

We all knew about this disgusting abridgement of our rights, but here it is in black and white:

Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Tex., sent a letter on Tuesday to President Donald Trump urging action on a centralized registry of guns and gun owners that, according to Gun Owners of America (GOA), violates multiple federal statutes. 

Cloud argued the database violates the 1986 Firearm Owners’ Protection Act and congressional spending bans on centralizing records or searching them by name.

“No one in their right mind can look at ATF’s digital, searchable 1.4 billion record database of firearm transactions and tell me that isn’t a gun registry. Several federal laws prohibit gun registration, so it’s truly shocking to see how ATF has disregarded the will of Congress here,” Aidan Johnston, GOA Federal Affairs Director told Just The News.

According to Johnston, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) digital database, managed by the National Tracing Center in West Virginia, has surged to 1.4 billion records, a significant increase from the 920 million records reported in 2021. 

The database contains various forms of identifying records such as firearm transaction records, names, addresses, and serial numbers. The records are primarily digitized from paper forms when gun stores go out of business, which happened at an accelerated rate under the Biden administration due to its zero-tolerance policies.

The ATF hides behind a definition:

…the ATF claims this is a tracing system rather than a registry.

Of course it does.  This ignores (uh huh) the fact that it’s a de facto  registration device — just an unintended consequence rather than a feature rather than a bug.  And as for the database’s apologists:

The ATF did not provide documentary evidence that traces from these records have produced successful violent-crime prosecutions.

Needless to say, avoiding the danger of appearing on said database just requires gun owners to utilize ummm impromptu purchasing methods (e.g. the “Texas transfer” and going to a nearby ELGS*).

Not that I would ever do anything like that to avoid appearing on the ATF’s “tracing system”, of course.

You all know the “simple solution” of this post’s title, don’t you?

Abolish the fucking ATF in toto, fire (not transfer) all its agents and bureaucrats, and burn the National Tracing Center to the ground.

*ELGS:  Evil Loophole Gun Show (coined by Rachel Lucas)

The Doomed Five To Make You Think Again

Disaster

What do you do when society — and specifically, a society’s infrastructure — either fails because of a Random Bad Event or else because of a series of cascading calamities brought on by years of neglect.

Here’s a piece which highlights the five places in the U.S. that you absolutely don’t want to be living in when the above S hits the F.

As much as I sometimes complain about living in north Texas, we seem to be in slightly better shape than any of the above areas, although the prospect of a catastrophic power grid failure in June with no hope of repair for months does certainly give one pause.  (We’re little different from Phoenix in that regard;  we have little access to water and life without air conditioning doesn’t seem survivable.)

At least we Texans have one thing going for us:  the chance of becoming prey to people who would take what little we have from us during calamitous times is somewhat reduced by the fact that we are not a disarmed populace — unlike, say, the Atlantic Northeast and Chicago, which are.

I know that we laugh at Europeans when they suffer from a major heat event like this previous summer;  but their summers are really, really short compared to our Western states, so at least they may be able to survive a couple of months, more or less, always with the chance of seasonal rain to help.  A typical eight-month-long dry Texas- or Arizona summer?  Not so much.

Sobering stuff, indeed.

Wait, What?

Crime, Legal Stuff, Two-Minute Hate

Okay, this one got my blood boiling:

A Texas man with a prior murder conviction is accused of running a “full-service drug operation” near several schools where authorities say surveillance showed what appeared to be teenagers purchasing narcotics and fentanyl pills disguised to look like ecstasy.

A convicted murderer was out free on the streets?  IN TEXAS?  How the fuck did that come about?  Why hadn’t he been executed, or at least still be behind bars for the rest of his worthless fucking life?

Also relevant:  whose signature is on the petition for release, and whose signature is on the release authorization?  (Yeah, we’ll probably never know that, because if we did, it could easily come about that the signatories would be dragged out of their house and beaten with iron bars and chains.  In any just society, that is.)

Read the whole thing to get the full horror of it.

Range time.