There are multiple factors that go into setting gasoline prices, making it hard to pinpoint a reason for an increase. However, a couple of contributors help explain the recent surge, AAA East Central spokesman Jim Garrity told the Louisville Courier Journal.
Snowstorms in the Gulf Coast shut down refineries, halting 40% of gasoline production last month. Prices of crude oil, which is what gasoline is made from, have also risen $15 since the beginning of the year, he said.
Gee, why are petroleum prices rising?
You know, policies of the new administration that stifle energy development in the United States and that de-stabilize this middle east? Nah, it’s just that petroleum prices are rising. Pay no attention to whatever’s behind the curtain.
I meant to take a picture of the local gas prices to pair with this image from October of last year:
However, I’m an old-school photographer and managed to get a finger over the relevant parts. Gas prices are a dollar higher here in the six months since I took the photo above. Because of a snow storm that lasted two weeks? Um, skeptical.
Perhaps the Neanderthal thinking of states opening up despite Federal SCIENCE!® Bureacracy will paper over how the new policies are going to impact employment. But only for a while. Maybe.
Longtime Milwaukee radio personality Karen Dalessandro is leaving town for a new gig in Phoenix.
Dalessandro, the former country music host who has been on the afternoon drive shift at WKLH-FM (96.5) for more than two years, will be taking over the same gig at another classic rock station, Phoenix’s KSLX-FM starting April 5, AllAccess.com reported Tuesday.
According to OnMilwaukee.com, her last day at WKLH will be March 26.
Dalessandro spent 20 years as a country radio host in Milwaukee at WMIL-FM (106.1). After briefly retiring in 2017 — she was inducted into the Country Radio Hall of Fame in 2015 — Dalessandro joined WKTI-FM (94.5), which had switched to a country-music format. After WKTI flipped to an all-sports format in 2018, she landed at WKLH as a part-time host, going full-time as the station’s host from 3 to 7 p.m. in 2019.
I guess I am coming up on 27 years since I last left Milwaukee.
The first time, of course, was at age 11; then I returned for the University, but when my prospects were uncertain (I had an English/Philosophy degree and a ton of grocery store experience), so I returned to the St. Louis area to live in my mother’s basement until I found myself (three years later, I landed a technical writing position because I was taking programming classes at night, not just because I had a writing degree).
So I have missed this veteran broadcaster’s entire career. She was inducted into the Country Radio Hall of Fame, for crying out loud. And even if I would have been there at the very outset of her career, I was not listening to WMIL. I was listening to the AOR stations at the time. QFM and whatnot.
I listened to WKTI when I was in high school on summer trips to my father’s house and early in my college days, but they played pop music then (and ‘hits’ like Calloway’s “I Wanna Be Rich” pretty much hourly. Like, hourly.
Although WKTI did introduce me to the Triplets, so it’s got that going for me.
But apparently WKTI has gone through two complete format changes in the interim.
I still have my Best of Dave and Carole from WKLH cassette which I have not listened to for a long time. I see that show ended five years ago. I should pull that old comedy tape out whilst I still have a motor vehicle that supports it.
Ah, well, everything passes, and in the twenty-first century, radio stations and radio personalities tend to swap around a lot and disappear.
You can bet my boys, who are exposed to a lot of radio for their age, won’t have the same nostalgia for stations and personalities that a couple generations of their forefathers did.
Disney Chief Executive Bob Chapek said the pandemic has likely permanently narrowed the window for movies to play only in theaters.
Pre-pandemic, cinemas depended on an exclusive 90-day window to screen films before they were made available to home distribution channels, such as pay TV and streaming services. But now, studios are tinkering with that timeframe, either shortening it or doing away with it altogether.
“The consumer is probably more impatient than they’ve ever been before, particularly since now they’ve had the luxury of an entire year of getting titles at home pretty much when they want them,” Chapek said late Monday at a virtual conference hosted by Morgan Stanley.
Also, major media corporations are tired of having to split the ticket price with movie theaters and of selling movies on physical media which users can watch over and over again with no recurring revenue to the major media corporation.
C’mon, man. We know that the consumer isn’t jumping; he’s being pushed.
Full disclosure: I own some Disney stock, so I’m benefitting in some small way from modern day robbery barony. But I’m also going to have to start hitting yard sales this year for backup DVD players to store with my backup VHS players.
I often hear the coyotes when I am taking the trash out around sunset. Perhaps they don’t range that far north over the creek. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new recommendations for gyms after two outbreaks of COVID-19 were linked to group exercise classes.
The new recommendations urge gym-goers to wear a mask even when exercising. Gyms are also asked to provide more ventilation to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Two outbreaks so everyone must conform? C’mon, man. This is America. And I think the powers that wannabe are going to find out how America this country still is.
Note the video segment features my YMCA and interviews a fellow Ozarks Multisport Club member rocking a Drown and Pound shirt. Neither the Y nor the OMC member seems inclined to require or wear masks whilst exercising.
Alright, alright, alright, I am not old enough to remember that song contemporaneously–the album of the same title came out the year before I was born–but I do remember that album because of Dennis Cast, the assistant manager of the grocery store where I worked through college (one of many assistant managers–and even though it had a couple different names because it had a couple of different owners, but it was the same store to me). I listened to what they called Album Oriented Rock in those days–slightly older hard rock music–and he tried to broaden my horizons by loaning me a couple of cassettes, including The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys and Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. To be honest, the long-riffing lightly psychadelic sound of the middle 1970s didn’t do it for me. But I remember the song and have called it up once or twice since.
My Two Dads; I remember a single episode, where they give a party and try to engage the teens in conversation, and the daughter imagines them as really old.
In that episode, the B.J. and the Bear dad asks if the tween boys thought Steve Winwood did his best work with Traffic. That’s almost an exact quote, but not enough to put in actual quotation marks. Steve Winwood, at the time, had returned to the charts with his comeback songs like “Back in the High Life Again” and “Valerie”. However, it was not something the kids were listening to on their own–back in those days, I think adult attention figured into the charts.
At any rate, what is the article about? The usual highlighting the inefficiencies of light rail mass transit, I suppose. I already know the outlines of the argument, so plugging in this particular set of costs and overruns, which will prove less than the numbers plugged into the articles on this topic next year, doesn’t add much.
But the title took me back a bit. Not all the way back to 1971. Back to 1992, anyway.
And the time I spent on this post is about 12 minutes. The length of the song itself.
Of course, I warned about this in 1991, but now it’s time to strip all traces of Native American nomenclature (including the English word Chiefs) from the culture.
Because, as a society, we have immatured from the ideal of celebrating shared humanity to “It’s ours, and you can’t have it.” Which will work out so much better, but that’s tomorrow, not today when one can take a Principled, Popular Stand.
A fossil-fuel power plant that helped drive Springfield’s 20th-century growth is now “officially decommissioned,” after a draw-down process spanning several years.
In a board meeting update last week, City Utilities officials noted that the last two remaining generator units at James River Power Station were recently retired.
Five turbines at the station generated energy from both natural gas and coal for CU customers beginning in 1957, CU said. In 2017, the CU board voted unanimously to shut down three of the units, which hadn’t been in service since the mid-2010s, the News-Leader reported.
Yay! Fossil fuels are bad! Shut down the fossil fuel plants!
Not that excess capacity in fossil fuel burning power plants is good. Nah, bro. Here are tips for living like it’s the nineteenth century because it makes you feel better about the environment when you’re not examining cause and effect.
Conservative commentators on Tuesday shared a false narrative that wind turbines and solar energy were primarily to blame for power outages across Texas as the power grid buckled.
In all, between 2 and 3 million customers in Texas still had no power nearly two full days after historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures created a surge in demand for electricity to warm up homes unaccustomed to such extreme lows, buckling the state’s power grid and causing widespread blackouts.
A variety of misleading claims spread on social media, with the Green New Deal and wind turbines getting much of the attention. But the Texas state power agency said that gas, coal and nuclear plants actually caused nearly twice as many outages as wind and solar power.
This does not actually refute that more capacity from fossil fuel plants would have alleviated this situation. All it points out is that some fossil fuel plants had trouble, too. Which is a logical fallacy called tu quoque. Not that they teach logic in j-schools. Or anywhere for that matter.
You know, my editor Jerry Pournelle used to point out a lot that cheap, reliable energy brought a lot of benefits. But renewable, green energy is neither cheap nor reliable, and the only benefits it confers are government subsidies and cotton-headed up twinkles for people who support it. Which is not to say that it cannot get there, but it surely hasn’t yet, and government subsidies and up twinkles are not the way to make them more efficient, cheap, or reliable.
Bitcoin was supposedly invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, a genius from Japan.
But no one knows who Nakamoto actually is — and nobody has come forward to convincingly take credit for definitively being Nakamoto. Lately, more and more people are speculating that it could be Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
The article lists a number of people who might be or who have been speculated to be the legendary developer.
City Utilities said late Sunday that the energy market’s supply of natural gas available for the Springfield area is “critical” and that the public should make every effort to minimize energy use during the current cold snap.
CU stopped short of issuing a “peak advisory” alert at this time, chief spokesperson Joel Alexander said. But he said it was “potentially” possible that a peak advisory or even “rolling blackout or brownout” conditions could be seen in Springfield in the near future. Meanwhile, market prices for natural gas have surged, costs that are likely to be passed onto ratepayers — a reality that prompted howls of online umbrage from customers who took to the City Utilities Facebook page Sunday.
The cancellation of the currently incomplete pipelines and whatnot did not lead to this shortage.
However, continuing to oppose new energy production and streamlined transportation of the energy products will lead to these situations continuing in the future.
But we never apply the if it saves one human life from freezing in the sort of cold snap that happens every couple of years yardstick to energy production and transportation, ainna? It’s always if it saves one animal life or some such.
Federal prosecutors are asking that a Pennsylvania woman arrested in connection with the Capitol insurrection remain in jail.
They say Rachel Marie Powell, who directed fellow rioters with a megaphone during the attack, had smashed cell phones, firearm paraphernalia and “go bags” at her home.
Prosecutors say this evidence proves she’s a danger to the community and a flight risk.
The subtext, of course, is that preparing for emergencies means you’re an insurrectionist. Also, probably racist.
The story has a picture of, apparently, one such go bag:
C’mon, man, my brother had a better set of thrown weapons when he was in middle school.
I am not sure how far you’ll make it with one hand warmer, though.
Has anyone accused her on Twitter for cultural appropriation for having throwing stars?
I am not sure why this made it to the front page of my local television station. Perhaps the twentied-aged news aggregators want to make her look whack-a-doodle, therefore GUILTY! DON’T BE LIKE HER! But this is southwest Missouri, man. People are reading the article for tips for their go bags.
Neo posts the complete Macbeth quote that includes the passage sound and fury which Faulkner later used as the title far a book. Actually, I made it through the first section of The Sound and the Fury some years after I was assigned the book in college; the first part is the disjointed bit told by the mentally handicapped brother, and it was only after I got a bit into Quentin’s section that I put it down.
The focus on Shakespeare’s quote and the Faulkner book are because, apparently, a journalist tried to Ha, ha! a Republican Senator for quoting the Shakespeare when everyone knows that’s Faulkner. Because that’s journalism in the 21st century: Ha-haing the ignorant Republicans. Even when they’re right.
But that’s neither here nor there.
What I did want to point out was that the Shakespeare speech that yielded the title of one of Faulkner’s most unreadable works (right up there with the rest of his work) is the source for the title of two Robert B. Parker novels:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
But Real Important Journalists are forgiven for overlooking genre fiction and Chris Lawrence (sorry, Chris).
At any rate, in researching this post, I have learned that I stopped reading in the Parkerverse, for the most part, about five or six years ago, and it looks like I am, what, fifteen or twenty behind? Well, I say behind as though I’m planning to catch up. Which I am not–I have plenty of Executioner novels yet to read as well as finishing up the Winter Reading Challenge and then David Copperfield (which is not going to be the In a Different Country category, as I am only a third of the way through it and could probably not finish it in the next two-and-a-half weeks if I tried).
A sign describing both Thomas Jefferson’s accomplishments and shortcomings beside his statue on the University of Missouri campus is the main recommendation of a task force charged with putting the statue in context.
The task force was created by UM System President and MU Chancellor Mun Choi in July 2020 after student Roman Leapheart launched an online petition to get the statue removed. Choi met with Leapheart, but Choi said the statue wouldn’t be removed. Members of the UM System Board of Curators later said it was their decision, though the decision wasn’t made in a public meeting.
I kind of wonder what education is for if not to teach history which itself provides context.
Maybe kids these days just need a meme to LOL at or something.
So I am listening to an audio course lecture series on Buddhism, and it’s from the turn of the century, so it’s holding Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar (formerly Burma, but so formerly that I probably don’t have to say that any more, although I probably should explain to public school kids where Burma is, but I won’t–this is the Internet. Look it up.) as an exemplary Buddhist.
I remembered the name, where she was from, and a bit about her doings before I heard the course (even though I went to public school, gentle reader, but that was in the last century, which was a whole different civilization ago). And I wondered if she was still around.
Apparently, a military coup in Myanmar has swept her government, recently reelected, from power and has returned her to her most famous state, being held prisoner by a military junta.
I will mostly spare you the blogger-stock glib quips. I have only sparsely thought of Myanmar/Burma, so I have no idea what’s going on there. They allege corruption and fraudulent elections, but that’s very common. Even in the United State in this new civilization we’ve got.
Walmart said it will convert space at dozens of its stores into high-tech warehouse space as it expects a surge in online orders for pickup and delivery will persist beyond the pandemic.
The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer said some store locations will get divvied up while others will get additional square footage to create on-site mini-fulfillment centers, in which automated robots roam the floor to retrieve certain items and bring them to an assembly work station.
The robots will whittle the process of picking and packing orders down to “a few minutes,” Tom Ward, senior vice president of customer product in the US, said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Personal shoppers will be used, however, to retrieve fresh food like meat and produce as well as bulkier items, he said.
On occasion, when I have gone to Walmart, I seemed to see more associates picking orders than shoppers. It wasn’t true, of course, but I wondered where the tipping point would come where Walmart would just close down the stores and turn them into warehouses.
I mean, it’s frozen custard, yo. I’m from Milwaukee. I’ve been to Kopp’s. I’ve been to Kalt’s. They serve frozen custard just as good, and they have burgers. So.
Although I’m going to try to get “So what do you get at Andy’s?” to be the Springfield equivalent of “So where did you go to high school?”
1983 is an interesting choice for The Internet is born, though. I had to research it. That’s when ARPANet went to TCP/IP. Well, maybe that’s when the “Internet” was rebooted, but born? Also note the accompanying photo is a Web browser. Which really doesn’t become popular for another decade and change. Kids Journalists these days, huh?
There’s no mention of his condition nor a hope for his recovery; no, just the stain of a positive test coupled with the bad things he said (that is, Republican positions on various issues), and casting wider aspersions on the Republicans who have not taken The Crisis seriously enough and have been/should be punished with the stain of a positive coronavirus test.
Nothing but making sure that everyone knows that this fellow, who thinks wrongly, bears the stain.
A pro-President Trump heavy metal guitarist has been identified as one of the US Capitol rioters, according to a report.
Multiple sources told the Indianapolis Star Wednesday that one of the suspects in the deadly Jan. 6 siege is Jon Schaffer, a founding member of a Florida-based heavy metal band called Iced Earth who is originally from central Indiana.
The article also notes no charges were filed against the artist. Maybe that means yet.
According to Iced Earth’s Web site, they have released like 30 albums and EPs since the founding in 1988. I have never heard of the band, but that’s true for most metal bands, even metal bands with recording contracts and multi-decade careers.
Don’t expect to find Iced Earth on my musical balance posts, though: I’m buying jazz lately, not heavy metal. And by “lately,” I meant this week. Last week was a long time ago. I cannot remember that far unless I look at my purchase history.
But I want you to know, gentle reader, I am keeping up the latest metal news for you.
