But…. Wait a minute….. You did bring Kirk back in The Return in 1996 (which I read in paperback in 2008). I guess that was 30 years ago, and Wikipedia sez that’s part of the “Shatnerverse” and not the real Star Trek canon. Which Paramount and whatnot have totally shatnered on, and not in a good way.
I guess Shatner is not as eager to play Kirk in his middle 90s as he is to play Metallica. Or is he? Perhaps it’s an attempt to drum up fan support for him to cameo sometime in the newer streaming shows. Who knows?
And why is Facebook showing me Star Trek things now?
The company that runs St. Louis’ light rail system is considering cutting the size of its trains in half — from two MetroLink cars to just one.
Bi-State Development said this would cut costs, increase sustainability and extend the life of its vehicles. The agency estimates running one-car trains could cut $800,000 to $4.8 million in maintenance costs every year, saving taxpayers money.
Bi-State Board Chairman Debra Moore said fewer cars could also make it easier for police to patrol MetroLink.
“I think that will greatly add to the frequency of ridership — it would increase because people will feel safer,” she said.
Of course, the article goes at great lengths to say that the (few) people who ride it would prefer the two car trains so that they have more room and don’t have to be crushed against the other (few) riders and to say that Metrolink is going to expand its lines so that it can take a few people farther.
Never questioned is “Why light rail?” Because something something Europe has trains, romance of the rails, and now sunk cost fallacy would be the answer.
Everton city leaders are warning residents that improper flushing habits could soon lead to higher sewer utility bills across the community.
Public works crews say they are repeatedly battling severe clogs caused by items that should never go down the drain—including hypodermic needles, washcloths, hygiene wipes, and even phone chargers.
Wait, it’s been a couple years since I’ve lived somewhere where my wastewater went somewhere other than under my failing orchard, but the wastewater not only includes what you flush but also what you run down your kitchen sink (even with the “garbage disposal” which only makes smaller bits to stick together somewhere down the pipe).
The bathroom of one of my martial arts school has the new-fangled “flushable” wipes instead of (as we have had at Nogglestead and at our home in Old Trees… almost decades ago, the cheapest non-linen infused double-ply you can buy). Yikes.
But, yeah, no. “Improper flushing”? No. A basic misunderstanding of what happens when you put something down the pipes, flushing or no, the diameters of said pipes, and….. Well, basic common sense. Which is not something you get in school or on TikTok (some overlap, too damned much in this current age). Or on “news” Web sites where your journalists are informed by TikTok and contemporary public schools.
A member of the Georgia National Guard deployed in Washington, D.C., as part of President Donald Trump’s task force to fight crime has been arrested for pulling a gun on a fellow Guard member in an alleged dispute over regulation haircuts.
My friend the Elvis impersonator managed to get himself a general discharge so he could grow out his pompadour back in the day. No firearms were brandished at this point, though.
One wonders if there is more to this story. Probably, but we’ll never know.
All the cool kids (Ace, Ed Driscoll, etc., etc.) are slagging on Ryan Reynolds for some pull quote from an interview where he says:
The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that. It was a tremendous strife. Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. ‘Top Gun.’ Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”
C’mon, man. The real world was not so bad, in retrospect. We were young, and although my 80s were a series of upheavals and dealing with being the nerdy kid in the trailer park (different from my 70s, which was being the white nerdy kid in the housing projects), I have fond memories of the time because, you know what? I turned out all right in the end.
But the pop cultural zeitgeist, or at least the pop culture force-feeding, was of imminent doom. Either the Soviets were going to conquer us, or we were going to get nuked. It was the era of The Day After, Testament, and Red Dawn; it was the era of post-apocalyptic films like Mad Max, Hell Comes to Frogtown, et cetera, et cetera.
Maybe I just remember the anxiety because I was a neurotic kid (I’ve grown out of it; I’m no longer a kid) and because I don’t have any memories that remotely resembled a John Hughes or other teen comedy to overwrite it. But, yeah, it turned out to have been a good time to be a kid. Or, I presume, a yuppie that appeared in some of the other programs of the era, the ones that were designed to mock the spirit of the age and not to dampen it.
But the Cuban Missile Crisis? He’s thinking about the television series Call to Glory where it featured prominently and which was part of the not hatefully and not ostentatiously anti-American counterprogramming competing with the pro-American and more popular programming–Rambo, Rocky, the blockbusters, and the fact that the conservative characters designed to be foils for the right-thinking characters (Alex P. Keaton, etc.).
But we don’t really remember that part of the 1980s because it was, for the most part, background noise. But present.
I’ll leave the final word to the Philosopher from a 1980 treatise:
Springfield-Branson National Airport (SGF) is still seeing the impacts from April’s hailstorm as visitors report glass shards from damaged cars scattered throughout the parking lots.
For those amongst us who might not be men, defined:
Toughened glass is processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength compared with normal glass. Tempering, by design, creates balanced internal stresses which causes the glass sheet, when broken, to crumble into small granular chunks of similar size and shape instead of splintering into random, jagged shards. The granular chunks are less likely to cause injury.
As a result of its safety and strength, tempered glass is used in a variety of demanding applications, including passenger vehicle windows, shower doors, architectural glass doors and tables, refrigerator trays, as a component of bulletproof glass, for diving masks, and various types of plates and cookware. In the United States, federal law since 1977 has required safety glass located within doors and tub and shower enclosures.
Yeah, it would be unaesthetic to have glass from those storms still present, but it’s not likely to be sharp, at least not the glass from broken windows from the storm–although broken vodka bottles are a different story. However, the airport would have to shut down the parking lot and clear it out to completely clean the parking lots as they have overlapping vehicle stays of sometimes days or weeks. AND they just had a rolling shutdown recently for resurfacing the lots last year. AND they just tore up and replaced all the flooring on the interior. So perhaps they’re sending people out on a rolling basis with a broom and dustpan who hasn’t gotten it all yet.
Hopefully, the glass the complainant saw was from those storms and not from later theft from parked cars which would be even more depressing.
Maybe I’ve just read too many thrillers, but I always evaluate what to do if someone comes in the door with a gun or with a knife and what I have at hand, hopefully longer than a knife or machete, to defend myself with if needed.
But grapple a person with a knife? Not if there’s another option, up to and including hitting them with a car.
A young student hoping to step into Book Week in the most delightful way has been dealt a cruel blow after her mother received the wrong costume just days before the parade.
While planning to attend her Melbourne school festivities as the iconic Mary Poppins, CostumeBox instead sent the 10-year-old girl a Kim Jong Un costume.
The family has been left in a scramble, racing to replace the Supreme Leader of North Korea ensemble before the parade takes place on Friday.
What is the world coming to when an Internet retailer can make a mistake?
Also, do so note it was a “Musical Nanny Deluxe” costume, not Mary Poppins. No license fees were paid to the intellectual property holder in this incident.
I read borderline high until they changed blood pressure guidelines, which meant I “needed” a prescription or two. Given that I’m going to visit a new doctor because my old new doctor was in the other health care system in town and my new Obamacare plan is with the other other system, I’ll get a new doctor who will likely want to put me onto cholesterol prescriptions, too. The healthy choice, if you’re considering the health of pharmaceutical company stock prices.
Half of my radio presets and the Worktunes country station will be in one company:
Two longtime radio companies are planning to combine their Springfield radio operations, if approved by federal regulators.
Zimmer Communications and Mid-West Family announced Wednesday that Mid-West Family will merge its Springfield operations into Zimmer Communications, pending approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The radio presets in the car include:
Q92.9 (KQRA) (Mid-West Family
98.7 The Dove (KTXR) (A service of Zimmer Communications)
104.7 The Cave (KKLH) (Mid-West Family)
The radio station that the stereos in the house and the Worktunes radio for mowing is set to 105.1 The Bull (KOMG) (Mid-West Family).
Ostensibly, the radio stations will no longer compete with one another, but aside from the overlap in the country stations (and it’s been a while since I listened to 101.3 Real Country to see how bro country it is), they probably won’t be adjusting the formats too much. I hope.
Panera Bread plans to move its headquarters from the St. Louis area to Weston, Massachusetts, in the Metro Boston area, according to an internal memo obtained by First Alert 4 Investigates.
CEO Paul Carbone informed all support center team members of the plan in a memo dated July 27, 2026. Staff were also told of the move on a call with Carbone Monday morning. Carbone has been with the company since 2023 and has ties to the Boston area.
* * * *
Panera has been open about struggles in recent years, including high costs, a drop in food quality and smaller portions. In response, the company worked to downsize and shift employees to a remote model.
I find it hard to believe there is a competitive advantage in relocating to Boston. But the CEO won’t have to go to the icky middle of the country.
How do I know it’s a Democrat-themed ad? Because Facebook shows me a preponderance of them. As though it would nudge me. Ah, but haven’t you listed on your determined attributes that I’m extremely conservative and have sold this insight far and wide?
How it works is: A Democrat Secretary of State (::cough, cough:: Robin Carnahan) schedules things that Democrats want on low-turnout Spring elections on off years where most people won’t bother, but the activists will show up. Republicans (Ashcroft II, in the royal line) schedules things Republicans want on high-turnout elections because normal people will outnumber activists.
So: This year, one of the amendments is to tighten restrictions on ballot initiatives making them harder to pass. Which I favor. So although I generally vote against state constitutional amendments (because ballot initiatives are the equivalent of one man, one vote, once principle in action (on low-turnout elections if the Democrats hold the Secretary of State position, etc.) and rewritten by the Secretary of State to clarify or obfuscate according to the Secretary’s party affiliation and position, and….
Yeah, no, this is not taking away the power of the people. It’s taking away the power of gaming this particular system into permanent, untouchable diktats.
As to the trip to Houston, I took I-44 to US 38 in Marshfield–the same route to the Independence Day parade, but then rolled east on 38 through rolling hills and hay fields through Hartville (although north of the White Hart Renaissance Festival) and into Houston which is not quite as big as some of the Springfield suburbs but is not exactly a small town. On the way home, I rode down US 63 which is a bigger road that runs through Cabool and down to West Plains, although I got onto US 60 (the Stepmother Road according to the current Citizens Bank of Rogersville radio ads I hear whilst cutting the grass).
One of the reasons I took the southbound route was because I wanted to visit Larry Dablemont’s museum down there. I didn’t see it, and last Monday he explained why:
I tried my best to create a Big Piney River museum and Nature Center near my hometown of Houston Missouri. But it was not to be and now I have to empty it in hopes that someone else can take over and use that building, there in a beautiful, wooded setting a mile south of town, for something useful and lasting. It could have been something great with all the Big Piney artifacts I have from 100 to 60 years ago. I planned all kind of exhibits and a Big Piney aquarium filled with river creatures. I thought God wanted me to do it but I know that sometimes I have tackled things I thought God wanted me to accomplish when it wasn’t His idea at all, but just a product of my own misguided enthusiasm.
My newspaper subscriptions have dwindled, so the dwindling number of papers that carry Dablemont are not available to me, so I need to make a better habit of visiting his blog for his weekly posts.
It could be the end of an era for newspaper readers in Taney County, Barry County, Stone County and beyond.
Journalists from the Branson Tri-Lakes News, the Stone County Republican-Crane Chronicle and the Barry County Advertiser told Ozarks First that all employees from these newspapers were laid off today.
I used to take the Branson Tri-Lakes News, but it was one of the first I let go because it was $100 a year–but it was twice a week.
The Stone County Republican was one I renewed even now because it had a number of local columnists I liked, including a garden column by Susan Lamb which I shall miss.
We got the most recent issue in the mail this week, and I said, “Uh oh” to my wife because the front page had been in color but was in black and white. I guess it uh-ohed out.
President Donald Trump on Sunday posted a falsified image of former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, waving before boarding an Air Force One that had been spray-painted with graffiti.
It came months after another racist post by the president that showed the couple as primates in a jungle. That one was deleted after stiff, bipartisan backlash.
The breaking news is that there is no news today, or that journalists think posting and being OUTRAGED!!!! about Internet chatter is news.
Want to know why I don’t post about the news much any more and instead am veering into long-winded reminiscences? Because all the news is like that, and posting a hot take on the news would make me like that.
A fast-moving, destructive storm ripped through southern Wisconsin Friday, leaving three people dead after their boat overturned on Geneva Lake during the busy Fourth of July holiday weekend.
And say Ackshually, it’s Lake Geneva, but:
The town is Lake Geneva, and the lake is just south of Lake Como, but the Internet maps show Geneva Lake for the body of water.
I guess I have just been warped by playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons before the editions were enumerated, when TSR was located in the town of Lake Geneva.
ACKSHUALLY, I probably have learned this sometime in the past and forgot it, and I’ll probably forget it again. Until I complete my collection of going to places where middle class Milwaukeeans travel for vacation (current total: 1, Wisconsin Dells).
Um, Daily Mail, perhaps you should lay off the knife metaphors given the state of “knife crime” in the UK and because it’s not “MAGA” embracing political violence in the US.
