Some Canadian parents want a heavy metal-loving high school principal to headbang her way to another job.
Parents at Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ontario launched a petition to remove Principal Sharon Burns because she is an unabashed fan of the legendary British band Iron Maiden.
Fortunately, the church has re-organized its Sunday School program over the last two years, so my beautiful wife does not face ouster from her only child-related instructional role over her notorious Iron Maiden fandom, and decades of uploads have knocked her from a high position on Google image searches for legs. Come to think of it, she is a scandal in a skirt.
At any rate, I think it’s just another instance of only looking at the iconography and metaphor and not looking through it to the substance. Iron Maiden’s music might have satanic themes, although not as much as some, but so does Dr. Faustus. But one should not confuse the appearance with the meaning, ainna?
It’s so unlike me to do a link dump, but I’ve got a number of interesting bits open in tabs and not enough time to write a post about each. Not that I spend hours writing intelligent, well thought out, and cohesive/comprehensive gloss on what others write anyway.
Yeah, no, I lived in a trailer because we couldn’t afford anything else. I’m not going to do it because it’s cool. Although kids today live in the new subscription economy, where monthly payments for lots more this-n-thats, cell phones, streaming services, and food delivery and whatnot have more line items in the budget than the utilities of old.
Although sometimes I think life would be simpler if I downsized to a single wide somewhere, I know it would not solve the restlessnesses that vex me from time to time because it’s not the sky, it’s myself. Or what Horace said.
Joe at Glorious Trash, whom I linked yesterday, also pointed me to this scholarly work on the early Mack Bolan books. However, a quick online search reveals that it runs $300 or so, so I’ll have to wait until after I get my copy of Summa Theologica, if ever–I have scheduled to forget I want this for next Tuesday.. Unless I find it for a buck at a book sale.
At the Imaginative Conservative Poetry and Holding the Center talks lauds memorizing poetry and how what you’ve just read tends to appear in the real world:
In an article for First Things in May of this year, the British writer Dan Hitchens reflected on what it meant to have poetry memorized, to have it “by heart,” as the old expression goes. He quotes a number of poems that have had a personal meaning to him or to others; as he puts it, they often don’t produce an epiphany, but rather “make sense of a feeling.”
What he means is a little different from the way that literature illuminates experience by making us see the real world more perceptively. The other afternoon, my daughter Julia was reading to me from the The Little Town on the Prairie, the seventh in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series, and in this scene, Laura tries to teach a young calf to drink milk rather than to suck it from her mother. She has to counter the calf’s instinct to butt the cow’s milk bag because the calf would knock over the bucket. After Julia finished reading, we went inside to dinner, and through the glass door we could see a fawn and a doe (mule deer are everywhere in Wyoming) close by in the adjoining pasture. The fawn repeatedly butted its mother’s milk bag, swinging its head up violently as it tried to nurse, obviously with the same instinct as the calf. It was like an illustration. Would we have noticed it in the same way if we had not just read Wilder’s description?
(Bob Belvedere of The Camp of the Saints turned me onto The Imaginative Conservative through Facebook postings–I am thinking about adding them to my blogroll but have not yet.)
I have known some operators like this, and double-dippers like this have made for awkward moments when interviewers ask me if their companies hire me whether I’d continue to consult. The answer is, yes, a little, from time to time, to keep my company active and to continue to support local causes who might have come to depend a little on my company for support. But not two full time positions at once, brah–I’m not going to burn myself out like that. But I am sure many of the interviewers have not believed me. If I were unscrupulous, though, I would just lie.
A local lawmaker has made an official request for Springfield Public Schools to search three years worth of email and other documents for any reference to critical race theory and 21 other “trigger” words or phrases.
State Rep. Craig Fishel filed the far-reaching Sunshine Law request in early September. The district responded to provide the cost for searching, copying and redacting an untold number of public records.
The district requested a deposit of at least $170,000 to start searching different servers. The final cost, including any copying and redaction, was expected to be higher, although the exact amount was unknown.
Fishel, a Republican from Springfield, alleged the district used “worst case scenarios to inflate the cost of fulfilling the request,” according to a press release sent Sept. 28 by the Missouri House.
The woman kept on running after the car hit her. She eventually returned to the scene with minor injuries.
You know, running out of Nogglestead takes you on a number of two-lane farm roads with high rates of speed and a state highway, but I’ve only had to dodge a car once (as it turns out, one of the fellows with whom I’ve studied martial arts and who built our new pool fence nine years ago was driving right behind the car I dodged and saw the whole thing).
One more reason for me to not run. Because if I got hit by a car, I would take the opportunity to lie down for a little while. Unlike some Gladyses of the world.
Also, the question arises, How out of date is “man card”? Seven years? Ten? Or more?
C’mon, man, it’s Benedict Cumberbatch. Even less difficult than guessing Simon LeBon.
And as for a bit of a behind-the-scenes note here at MfBJN: In composing this post, I fact-checked myself and did not publish two things I thought to be true but which are not.
First, I asserted in a throw-away line that Benedict Cumberbatch had two doctorates, one in Who and one in Strange. However, I looked to make sure he did play Doctor Who, but guess what? He’s one of the British actors who appeared in American media around the same time, so I just assume that they all played the new Doctor Who at some point. However, neither he nor Tom Hiddleston actually played Doctor Who, which I shall have to remember to avoid making this mistake, perhaps in haste, in the future.
The second one was that I was going to make light of this other article from The Sun the same day:
I was going to say, Haw, Haw, dumb journalist! That’s not a spade, that’s a shovel! However, apparently in Britain, according to this Web site, and perhaps everywhere in the world except Nogglestead, the spade does not look like the playing card suit with a pointed tip; what we call a spade at Nogglestead is merely a digging shovel, and the spade has a flat edge after all.
So journalists and headline writers in the U.K. might be smarter than me. Or perhaps I need to work in the garden more instead of spending a lot of time writing and researching a blog post to be seen by a handful of people.
But rest assured, I have lairs and lairs of fact checkers.
That hasn’t stopped die-hards. A small community of VHS fanatics has sprung up around the country, trading tapes and tips on how to watch. Much of it is organized around small boxes where people can drop off or pick up tapes. The “Free Blockbuster ” boxes started in Los Angeles and spread. There are VHS tape trading events and auctions.
In the late 1990s, Hollywood studios began selling films on DVDs and VHS rentals lost their grip on home viewings. Blu-ray took over in the early 2000s. By 2010 Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection.
Lordy, I hope not. I’ve seen what has happened to the price of records in the wild, and now that I’m actively accumulating VHS and DVDs, I’d hate for the prices also to quintuple.
But, wait, the article is actually about a silly Little Free Videocassette Sharing fad:
To try to re-create a bit of the video-store experience, Brian Morrison started Free Blockbuster in 2019. The group turns former newspaper boxes into free little libraries of movies. VHS die-hards hope the effort encourages the exchange of home entertainment with strangers in their neighborhood.
What happened to the The Handmaid’s Tale references? Not fresh enough thirty-five years after the book originally appeared and four Republican presidents that did not lead to a theocracy later?
The ones who were able to attend school as children and were forced to keep their daughters at home when the Taliban took over.
Consider how much it must hurt for your daughter to have fewer rights and opportunities than you had because religious extremists forced their beliefs on an entire country.
Imagine the mothers in Texas.
The ones who knew that if they experienced an unwanted pregnancy that could have ruined their lives, they had the right to make their own medical decisions. The ones whose daughters will not have that same right.
Maybe you should tell your daughters to save themselves for marriage or at least limit themselves to serious partners, to use birth control to limit the chance of pregnancy, to consider carrying the child to term and offering him or her for adoption.
Nah, just tell your daughter that the potential life within her is not life at all, and that her political enemies are evil. Because that’s worked swimmingly so far.
Man, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch mommy blogging has really gone off the cliff since Dana Loesch left, ainna?
Just suppose you wanted to drive all the good people out of law enforcement and patriots out of the military, leaving only those who believed that white people and Trump supporters are evil and deserve to have the guns of government turned on them. What would you do differently from what is going on now?
(See also Kim du Toit on one such likely to remain.)
A spokesman for the school district called the lawsuit a misinformation campaign, designed to undermine the district’s efforts to provide equity for everyone.
That’s what stakeholders, that is, parents and taxpayers, want to talk about but the school district doesn’t want to hear. Or maybe it’s just the school board doesn’t want to hear it because they don’t have any power over the administrators of the district.
Anyone want to wager whether the Daily Dammit, Gannett! finds something on social media to get the word Trump into its headline?
What kind of changes? Fewer chances for parents and taxpayers to speak up.
Springfield’s Board of Education will make changes to the way it takes public comment at future meetings.
The announcement came during Tuesday’s meeting: Public comments will be limited to ten speakers per meeting in the future.
Each speaker will need to sign up ahead of time, and each will have three minutes to voice concerns or ask questions.
The changes have come after several marathon meetings in recent months. On Tuesday, the meeting lasted nearly four hours, with 28 people signing up to speak.
Remember when the only controversial decisions school boards had to deal with was whether to ban Slaughterhouse Five once every couple years?
Now, schools are making political judgement calls regarding education all the time, and they don’t want to be told to stop.
We ranked the 200 biggest U.S. cities from best to worst (1-200) based on their overall scores (out of 100 points), averaged across the weighted metrics listed below.
Public Health
Share of Population in Good Health (Weight: 3)
Physical Activity Rate (Weight: 3)
Share of Population Who Jogged in Past Year (Weight: 2)
Vulnerability
Natural Hazards Index (Weight: 1)
Number of Military Bases (Weight: 1)
Hospitals per Capita (Weight: 2)
Infrastructure
Average Home Square Footage (Weight: 2)
Share of Available Homes with Basements (Bunkers) (Weight: 3)
Share of Homes with Complete Kitchen Facilities (Weight: 1)
Share of Homes with Complete Plumbing Facilities (Weight: 1)
Although the “methodology” mentions the number of gun stores, it does not say anything about the number of guns already in private hands, nor does it talk about population density (the fewer people nearby, the fewer potential zombies). In both of these cases, Springfield is already high on the list. Or the number of preppers in the area, nor the neighborliness or Christian values of an area–which would lead to better bonding of groups of survivors, but probably less intrigue than you get in the popular culture.
It’s why your zombie apocalypse movies and television shows take place in urban environments, where different people get thrown together and are suspicious of each other.
But, yeah, the number of basements here is indeed low, which really surprises me since this area gets its shares of tornadoes.
Also, good on that particular content writer, cranking out that blog post for maybe $50 and getting it picked up by at least one newspaper. Unless, of course, it was done the easy way–being the reporter herself or a friend of the same.
MoDOT has plans for a new roundabout near Republic, which as drivers talking.
“You are essentially entering into a guessing game,” said local Param Reddy.
That roundabout will be installed at the intersection of route ZZ and Farm road 182, right by the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield.
MoDOT officials said it would cost around $1.3 million and start construction in Spring of 2023.
As you might know, gentle reader, I oppose roundabouts for a couple of reasons, and this one will illustrate why very well.
This is the intersection in question. ZZ runs north and south and is a pretty straight state highway with good visibility in both directions. Farm Road 182 is hilly and curvy. The intersection itself is within the bounds of the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield, so the speed limit on 182 drops to 20, but this is rarely observed. Farm Road 182 has stop signs, but ZZ has no control device.
I have come to this interchange a couple of times where I’ve had to wait behind cars at the stop sign for a couple of minutes, but rarely more.
The area is developing, so perhaps a control other than the stop sign would be in order eventually, but not a roundabout.
The roundabout is expensive; it will cost at least $1.3 million at least, and its construction will add delays to the intersection.
The roundabout slows down traffic on the highway even if there’s no merging/crossing traffic. Instead of continuing north or south at speed, drivers on ZZ will often have to slow down unnecessarily when no traffic is present on Farm Road 182.
The roundabout is inflexible. A stop light can be set to flashing yellow or enabled with sensors to know when to change based on the presence of vehicles. Not the roundabout. It’s the light rail train of interchanges. You cannot adjust it. You can only endure it.
I continue to believe that traffic engineers hate people who drive cars, and I’m starting to think that they’re all from the city and ride ebikes to work. Someone from the country who needs to go ten or twenty miles or more when driving doesn’t need a bunch of European traffic fads. We need consistent speeds to get from one point to another.
But I did not go to expensive Traffic Engineering School, which seems to lead to this thought process:
Roundabouts.
Diverging Diamond Interchanges.
Diverging Diamond Interchanges with roundabouts at each end.
Diverging Diamond Interchanges with roundabouts at each end and smoke machines! That will slow the traffic down.
If it saves just one life, it’s worth it! Although I’m not sure that in the ten years that I’ve lived at Nogglestead that one life has been lost at that intersection. Maybe, but it’s not Blood Alley by any means to warrant this imposition.
The “article,” for paying subscribers, is entitled “Young reporter threatened; columnist told that his head is up his #*@”.
C’mon, man, we know what the readers are responding to: The hype stories from the new kid and that the closest thing that the paper has to a local columnist has been writing political diatribes knocking people skeptical of the Recurrent Unpleasantness instead of explaining what’s being built on such and such corner and what’s the story about that one thing we pass on our daily commute.
One wonders how much the article, for subscribers only, will reinforce a certain block of subscribers and how much the article will lead to cancelled or lapsed subscriptions.
I expect both, but for the Daily Dammit, Gannett to continue to shrink in size and subscriber base.
The National Rifle Association just lost one of its most famous board members.
In an email to the board obtained by The Reload, NRA general counsel John Frazer announced rock star Ted Nugent is stepping down from his role as a director. Frazer said the group thanked Nugent for his decades-long service on the board. He cited “ongoing schedule conflicts” as the reason Nugent would no longer serve.
I’m still a member, and I hope the organization straightens itself out. I keep nominating Darbo for the board. Maybe now they’ll listen.
An article on Substack called The Algorithm: The media’s new business model is propaganda explains partly why the media are so untrustworthy–they’re currently seeking readership by reinforcing political and lifestyle narratives and group memberships and because they don’t do any reporting on their own, instead just gleaning what they can from online sources–generally sources biased to their points of view–and regurgitating it in their own words. Basically, journalism as writing college papers.
Unexplored, of course, is the often stated but rarely adequately defended thesis from here at MfBJN, that to the 23-year-old J-school graduates who provide the majority of the print and online content today, putting tweets into paragraph form is journalism because Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and whatever comes next is real life to them. It’s what they know.
Which is why I only trust, sometimes, what I read in the nine small town papers I take. Because why would Bonnie lie to me about what happened in Handy, Missouri, last week?
But the database does not track death specifically attributable to the COVID-19 vaccine. Instead, it tracks “all serious adverse events following vaccination against COVID-19 — regardless of whether the vaccines are to blame.”
Therefore, any death that occurs after one is vaccinated could be counted in the VAERS system. According to VAERS’ website, the database is “not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem.”
Silly reader! You only count deaths from the virus that way, not deaths from the vaccine!
Oh, noes, I am spreading misinformation. Perhaps I shall be disparaged by a 23-year-old J-school graduate for exercising my rights and earn a scarlet M.
