Category: News

Here’s why canned corn might be tough to find at supermarkets:

Add canned corn to the list of supermarket staples that have become elusive amid the COVID-19 crisis.

The pandemic has roiled the supply chain for canned sweet corn in several ways, meaning it might be tough to track down at your local grocery store, a new report says.

The New York Post links to a Wall Street Journal slideshow that has all the normal things: limited sweet corn production, limited and expensive transportation, brisk sales in the past. Basically, a lot of people bought canned goods this year, which depleted existing stocks, and not enough will be coming through the pipeline to replace all that was already sold.

I say I could have used this yesterday as I went to the grocery and bought six cans of whole kernel corn on sale, and I should have bought twelve. As it stands, I culled our cabinet collection for the quarter and took a couple hundred pounds of cans, mostly vegetables, to the local food bank. The vegetables at our local grocery tend to have a “best buy” date that doesn’t move but every couple of years; when the canned goods in 2018 say Dec 2020, they will say Dec 2020 until sometime in mid 2020, which means everything I buy for a year and a half will become food pantry fodder at the same time. So I have far fewer just-in-case food on hand than I did earlier this week, and in an election year, too.

Good thing I have news like this so that me and several million of my closest friends can make a run on the grocery stores to clear them of all canned corn to help solve the problem.

Meanwhile, I need to get to the grocery more often. The whole pick up something extra every trip, which goes along with the pick up something for the food bank every trip, kind of fails when every trip is once every fortnight instead of a couple times a week.

Emu runs loose: Big bird named Kermit escapes Haverhill yard, stretches its long legs:

The emu named Kermit was being handled by a Haverhill woman who temporarily cares for animals in need of homes. On Wednesday morning, the woman was in the process of transporting Kermit to a farm in Maine when the bird tried to make a quick getaway. According to a resident who saw the incident, a gust of wind blew open a gate to the property where the bird was being held, and Kermit ran.

The bird calmed down after being given a pear from a nearby pear tree and was carried to safety.

The police did not have to shoot it eight times. Although that was a different time; in the intervening decade and a half, the Carbondale police force undoubtedly has gotten some armored vehicle remainders from the United States Government and can now simply run down the bird with an MRAP if they don’t have a pear handy.

(You can see all of my mockery of the incident here. This link via Neatorama.)

Springfield has extended mandatory virtual signaling, and they have followed the Science!^TM:

“We know that whether or not masking is 20% effective, or 50% effective, or 90% effective, they are effective, and they will save lives,” said CoxHealth CEO Steve Edwards.

One wonders if 0% effective would still be effective, since it is the noun that the percentage modifies regardless of what the percentage is. According to this accounting, sneezing on a chain link fence is effective if but one tiny virus clings to it instead of floating free.

Sixty percent of the time it works every time.

Pokin Around: Story of Robert Rosendahl’s boat has a new chapter: Destination Tahiti:

Stories hold a force that can transcend life.

Few have the power of the tale of Robert Rosendahl, World War II vet who survived the Bataan Death March, and his boat.

Rosendahl died at age 98 on Feb. 2. The love of his life, Bettie, had died 40 days prior on Christmas Day 2019.

But that is not the end of this story.

Six men in their 60s, including Rosendahl’s son Eirik, plan to fulfill Rosendahl’s dream of finishing the boat — that he first started to build in the early 1980s — and sail it to Tahiti in the South Pacific.

For decades, the boat has sat unfinished on the lawn of the Rosendahl home near Golden Avenue and Republic Road.

After Pokin’s first story on the boat ran in 2015, I looked for the boat when I was driving through that area. It was a bit hidden amongst trees, but I spotted it from time to time. When I didn’t think it was on Scenic Avenue just to the east and look for it there.

Golden has become one of our preferred bike riding routes, so I passed that boat a bunch this year. It’s easier to spot as some of the woods around it have been pared back. And I knew that one day soon, something that I’d seen in my few years in Springfield, something whose history I knew (thanks to Steve Pokin), would be gone. The house would be sold, perhaps razed for a business or multifamily housing, and a bit of Springfield lore lost forever.

If it’s going to go, though, I am glad it will be used as the former owner intended.

For some reason, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has this story on its front page, albeit at the bottom, today:

Oh, come now, we can all know the reason: It wants to hurt a Republican.

It looks like the Journal-Sentinel has a rotating series of stories in the same area, and they might have that one thing in common.

Editorial: West on fire, Great Lakes on the rise, and other climate perils:

The Midwest doesn’t generally have to cope with wildfires, but here, too, climate change is altering our environment in ways that are powerful and dangerous to people as well as property. The most obvious effect is the rising waters in the Great Lakes. Lake Michigan, Erie and Huron set all-time records for high levels this year, and Superior broke its February record. Recent years have been the wettest for the Great Lakes in more than 120 years.

I am so old that I remember a couple years ago when the very opposite worry was true:

Lake Michigan has officially sunk to an all-time low.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reported Tuesday that in January the lake plunged below its previous record low level, set in March 1964.

The water is now more than 6 feet below the record high, set in October 1986. The water level is tracked by gauges placed around Lakes Michigan and Huron, which are actually one body of water connected by the Straits of Mackinac. Daily measurements are then averaged at the end of each month for record-keeping purposes.

Remember, gentle reader, when anyone talks about climate measurements being the mostest and the worstest in history, they do not mean like since Ur and the flood that appears in many historical mythologies (the current amount of fresh water, a scarce commodity in many parts of the world, is a CIVILIZATION ENDING EVENT!). History in this case means a hundred years or so when measurement began, and where the measurement in the early part of “history” was not standardized or as precise as it is now.

But the countdown is on to the next set of stories talking about how low lake levels are not going to provide enough water for the cities and the fish. I think it’s got about six years of sand in that particular glass.

1. Bank branches/lobbies are closed.
2. Depositors cannot deposit coins through the drive-thru.

The end.

I don’t know if that’s completely the case, but I don’t see businesses who would normally deposit coins putting their money in the Coinstar machines.

The people with piles of coins at home or charities that generally accumulate a bunch of quarters, dimes, and nickels, though, also don’t have a way to deposit those coins.

Could it be as simple as that?

The headline is Missouri burns through $1.3 million in veterans’ money in effort to limit marijuana businesses.

But the story is:

Seven months after state officials finished awarding medical marijuana business licenses, regulators have spent $1.3 million in court to defend themselves against a wave of lawsuits filed by businesses whose applications the state denied.

* * * *

The money spent on legal fees to private law firms — $1.29 million so far — comes from fees medical marijuana cardholders and business applicants have paid the department. Those fees, after covering the cost of running the program, are supposed to be deposited into a new Veterans’ Health and Care Fund.

It is not clear what programs the “journalist” would prefer to cut to pay for the increased costs that the appeals and lawsuits cause. Education? Tax abatements for developers or film producers? Health care for the poor?

Missouri doesn’t have the magic beans that can grow the unlimited red ink trees that the federal government has. Maybe that’s the key: more money with puppetmaster strings from Washington!

It’s almost like some people have never learned basic balance sheets or budgeting.

We’ve had occasion to drive through the area south of downtown a couple of times recently; once, with the boys, we had a little extra time before church, so we went for a ride. The second was after a dinner with my wife downtown. Both times, as we went through the area near the university, I reviewed all the new construction–for years, developers have been in the news seeking blight designations for older but still viable properties so they could get tax abatements to construct dazzling new apartment buildings for students. “You know who’s hurting? These guys who have just taken huge mortgages for what are now empty buildings.”

I said it last week; the Wall Street Journal gets there this week: Covid-19 Outbreaks Spell Trouble for Student-Housing Owners.

One might think that you might be able to pick up those new apartment buildings relatively inexpensively in a year or so. I’m not sure if you’d want to, though, as the whole university thing is going to change in the next couple of years as well and might not have the large resident populations that they have in the past.

Editorial: The protests didn’t kill David Dorn. A criminal did — with easy access to a gun.

Yeah, um. But:

It’s practically meaningless to ask where he got the gun, since anyone in Missouri can privately purchase a gun from anyone else with no questions asked. Missouri’s Republican leaders, like their congressional counterparts, have made sure of that by opposing universal background checks for all gun purchases.

Because the Post-Dispatch already has its point to make–the protests are peaceful, guns are bad–it doesn’t matter if the convicted felon and continuing criminal got his gun through the means–private sales–that the Post-Dispatch wants to flog or whether he got it through other means which are illegal and would not be stopped by more laws restricting the law abiding but not convicted felons and continuing criminals. The editorial writer does not need know whether he stole the gun, got the gun from someone who illegally purchased the gun for him, received the gun as a gift from a fellow criminal, or bought the gun from another convicted felon who should not have had the gun, either, and would not have run a background check if the law required it. Knowing it might have made the editorial impossible.

So, yeah, it’s not important to the canned editorial the newspaper opened.

In the real world, though, even if this law were in place, hobbling law-abiding citizens, this guy would probably still have gotten a gun.

Young people don’t trust anyone who uses this punctuation mark:

Periods may be coming to a full stop.

While older texters may consider the period an innocent symbol that a sentence has ended, digital natives consider it a triggering form of aggression. The punctuation problem ignited over social media recently, with Gen Z and millennials agreeing that ending a sentence with a period is overly hostile and, worse yet, extremely uncool.

“Only old people or troubled souls put periods at the end of every sentence,” wrote digital culture journalist Victoria Turk in her book on digital etiquette, “Kill Reply All.”

Instead… I will aggress… the subset of young people… who are triggered… by digital dots… and I vow… to use ellipses… BECAUSE I AM MEAN.

If you cannot trust a digital cultural journalist peddling her own book, whom can you trust?

Dozens of Battlefield neighbors gather to sign petition against proposed zoning:

A large plot of land that once was supposed to be a school is now drawing quite a bit of concern from neighbors who fear it could soon be the home of a large apartment complex.

Back in 2019, Springfield Public Schools sold a 34-acre property south of Harrison Elementary School. The property was sold to SPI of Springfield, LLC. While the property is currently zoned for singly family homes (R-1), the developer initially requested it be rezoned for multi-family homes.

Residents in the area are upset by the proposal, which would lead to single-family homes and an apartment complex being built on the land.

People living nearby said the proposal comes with an assortment of issues.

As someone who has passed through the area on a bicycle this weekend, I can assure you that this is not in the city of Battlefield.

That’s unincorporated Greene County. It’s not even within the 65619 area code, which is the Brookline post office located way up north of Republic but curls around the eastern boundary of Republic and includes Battlefield to the east and Clever and Billings to the south (man, they have to go a long way to pick up their packages–it’s almost a half hour at freeway speeds for us). So I have no idea where KY 3 got the idea to call this neighborhood “Battlefield”. It’s more likely to be annexed by Springfield than Battlefield.

Previously, KY 3 extended the boundaries of Battlefield to the north.

I have to be a Battlefield partisan early, as the boundary of the city is the big empty field across the farm road from me, and someday, they might decide to annex Nogglestead.

You know, they used to say, “Good enough for government work.” I think we have a new low standard, “Good enough for young journalist work.”

1986-87 Fleer Basketball Cards case containing Michael Jordan rookie sells for more than $1.7M:

An unopened case of 1986-87 Fleer Basketball Cards sold for more than $1.78 million in an auction conducted by Collect Auctions on Thursday night.

The auction house described the box as “the Holy Grail of all modern items” and possibly the last one left in the sports-card collecting hobby. The case includes 12 wax boxes with 36 packs to a box.

You know, I have many of my childhood collections, and I have always maintained that one cannot get rich from the things from one’s childhood.

In spite of this incident, I’m going to hold to it. Because an unopened box likely came from a speculator or the remnants of an out-of-business collector shop somewhere. Not from someone’s childhood.

(Link via the Springfield Business Journal.)

Loud boom startles Jefferson County residents; deputies track down source.

Spoiler alert: It involves tannerite.

Used-Car Dealers Really, Really Want to Buy Your Vehicle

The flip side of this is that you have to pay through the nose if you want to buy a used car, too.

Anyone remember Cash for Clunkers?

Naw, man, that was like 11 years ago.

Apparently, the Hickory Horned Devil is the largest centipede in Missouri and looks fierce.

But it’s no giant red-headed centipede which looks fierce and is venomous.

Trucker sues Bass Pro after being hit by falling freight:

When Moore got to Florida, the lawsuit says Moore noticed that a load bar was dislodged and a palette had moved in the trailer.

The lawsuit says Moore asked Bass Pro employees to fix the palette and load bar, but they refused and told Moore it was his responsibility.

You know, I worked as a shipping and receiving clerk at an art supply store shortly after college, so the trucks I unloaded sometimes had palettes on them. But everywhere else where I’ve dealt with truck-delivered goods, the trucks have only had pallets.

No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public:

Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles.

Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was “to standardize collection and reporting” on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days after passage of the intelligence authorization act.

My oldest son brought the story up the other day.

Of course, I’m old enough to have read about Project Blue Book in paperbacks from the 1960s and to have downloaded Majestic-12 text files from BBSes in the 1990s. So I’ve seen stories like this before.

So I am skeptical, of course. I’m skeptical of everything I read on the Internet (even this blog) and most things I read in newspapers.

(Link via Glenn Reynolds’ USA Today column “In 2020, anything’s possible. New government intelligence might prove alien life is, too.“)

Check your couch cushions: One Chick-fil-A offers free food voucher if you exchange coins:

If you have at least $10 in spare change, a Chick-fil-A in Virginia will offer you free food for them.

Amid the nation’s coronavirus-caused coin shortage, franchise owners in the city of Lynchburg are running a special on Wednesday. The chicken restaurant is offering a free entree voucher to customers who exchange $10 of rolled coins for $10 in paper cash.

You know, if you exchange money for a food voucher, the food is not free.

Clearly, they are not teaching free-market economics to journalists these days.