Category: News

The headline: CNN host Wolf Blitzer roasted for NFL TV setup after fans spot ‘veteran’ detail.

What, was something plugged in incorrectly? A slice of cheese on the uncooked meat, metaphorically speaking? Nah: Twitter just is dumb kids:

While Blitzer has been waiting a long time to witness his Bills lift the Lombardi Trophy, it appears it’s been even longer since he bought a new television.

According to his own photo, the reporter owns a very old school home entertainment setup, featuring a plasma screen television, DVD, VHS and CD players, and at least four difference remotes.

Social media users were quick to roast Blitzer for his ‘veteran’ setup as many urged him to upgrade his setup to more modern standards.

‘Love the two VCR’s. Can rewind one while watching another. Veteran move,’ one fan posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

‘Bro is stuck in the 80’s with his furniture and TV. I thought @CNN paid better. Viewership must be way down,’ another added.

‘Like most grandparents, 20 year old tv with 20 year old peripherals,’ a third said, suggesting Blitzer wouldn’t be the sole member of his generation with a similar setup.

Yeah, dumb kids. Thanks to the news media for reporting the tweets of the uninformed, who will watch, briefly, the latest streaming pap or approved wokelderized versions of classics. Who own nothing and pretend to like it on the Internet.

Nogglestead’s peripherals are older than that. Even the television, big screen projection model that it is, is coming up on 20 years old. And I have almost fifty-year-old gaming systems hooked up.

I would pretend to get worked up about Twitter kidz (who might be 40 years old these days), but I cannot even pretend anymore. It’s all so tiresome.

Postal customers say they’re fed up with backlog of mail sitting in Springfield’s post office

I guess it’s not just me wondering about whether we’ve reached the “then quickly” part of the death of the USPS.

The reporters reached out to the Springfield post office where a man’s drugs-by-mail sat unmoved for days, and their response echoed that of the Postmaster General:

I only reiterate these problems because post offices have been a hallmark of a growing functional country. I mean, one of the only good things to come out of the Qin Shi Huang dynasty in China was a post office, and Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General of the United States over two hundred years ago. A government organization which cannot do its function but instead does oh, so many other things of lesser value is really a fin de siècle symptom.

We watched the holiday movie Die Hard 2: Die Harder last night, and today we learn Die Hard 2 star dies after long health battle as heartbroken wife pays tribute

It was Art Evans, who played the engineer Barnes.

I need to stop reading and watching anything since people I read or watch keep dying.

I have been listening to KCSM, the Bay Area’s jazz station, streaming during the workdays recently to shake things up as WSIE has a pretty limited playlist.

As such, I heard the National Weather Service trigger the emergency broadcast system, and it was not a test. And it was not something we hear when the sounders go off here in Missouri: It was a tsunami warning.

Fortunately, it did not wipe anyone off the beach:

National Weather Service cancels tsunami warning for U.S. West Coast after 7.0 earthquake.

I feel a little like a world traveler and haven’t left my office.

Young men leaving traditional churches for ‘masculine’ Orthodox Christianity in droves:

As more and more Protestant churches unfurl Pride flags and Black Lives Matter banners in front of their gates, young men are trending toward more traditional forms of worship.

A survey of Orthodox churches around the country found that parishes saw a 78% increase in converts in 2022, compared with pre-pandemic levels in 2019. And while historically men and women converted in equal numbers, vastly more men have joined the church since 2020.

Pop Protestantism, perhaps. But such are not ‘traditional’ in any sense of the word.

Authorities would have been okay with firearms and cocaine. But firearms, cocaine, and chickens? Down comes the hammer.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is a Gannett paper, so there’s no way to read the article to see if it was fighting chickens and perhaps the attendant gambling, but one can speculate.

Given that it’s in the Entertainment section, perhaps.

Will these Missouri GOP leaders swear to defend abortion rights? We asked..

Yeah, the young people in charge of “journalism” made a beeline to ask Republicans if they would swear their oath of office even though the constitution now says to kill babies on demand based on a rather narrow ballot initiative that was ready to go in the event of the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade.

Gotcha, Republicans! Are you going to not swear into office now?

What a daft piece of work this is. I don’t recollect any such things when legislators passed restrictions for the Democrats whether they would follow the dictates of laws passed by the legislature to restrict abortion when the Supreme Court passed this back to the states. No, all those stories were about how the states were violating Roe vs. Wade. Laws that could be overturned by other laws passed by legislators.

Instead, we get continued ballot initiative abuse, where instead of representative government, we get One Man, One Vote, Once lawmaking via driving turnout in a particular election.

And prepare yourself for the tut-tutting inherent in stories like ‘Voters want restrictions’; State rep from West County wants abortion restrictions back on ballot where an elected official wants to use the system to reverse what the broken system has wrought.

You know, gentle reader, I am only a little cynical, and I don’t get out much, but I bet people with clipboards appeared in various places on Wednesday morning to gather signatures for another Constitutional Amendment to undo this constitutional amendment.

Because in addition to being a moral question and a sacrament of modern liberalism, the abortion question is big business on both sides. And it won’t be solved until it stops being big national business.

Meanwhile, if you will excuse me, I will be over here supporting the local pregnancy resource center that helps pregnant women at risk.

1. I have not actually done a triathlon in over a year.
2. Even when I was doing triathlons with regularity (four last year), I was no where near the World Championship level. Bloody heck, I was barely at the finish without injury and/or walking part of the run level.

Although I guess I have moved up two spots in the world rankings:

Two competitors die in one day during Triathlon World Championships

Although this is not likely true if anyone thought to himself or herself today, “Hey, I wonder if I could do a triathlon.”

How safe are safety deposit boxes? They’re not as protected as you may think

John Donnelly’s Gold turns on such a thing which my aunt, who temped at a bank, told me was unlikely…. but not impossible.

(Link via Wirecutter.)

In the September 2024 Reader’s Digest, we have a little aside that is a little incomplete.

The title of the 1970s movie The China Syndrome refers to the idea that if you dug a tunnel through the earth (ignoring the molten lava core), you’d end up in China.

C’mon, man. Who wrote that? Don’t answer; I know it’s someone who was born this century and does not know that China syndrome refers to a nuclear meltdown at a nuclear plant where the core would burn hot enough to descend into the earth. No, not all the way to China, but still, it would be bad. The young person would also not know that The China Syndrome is one of the reasons we don’t have nuclear power almost fifty years later.

I remember seeing a lot of headlines in summer of 2001 about shark attacks. So when I start seeing lots of stories about different animals seemingly attacking humans a bunch like Jogger left bloodied, dazed and crying after getting mauled — by a gang of otters and River otter attacked and dragged child under the water, wildlife officials say, I start to get a little anxious.

Of course, it probably is just a matter of “journalists” suddenly watching news services and X.com for matching stories to dish up as companion pieces.

It does not calm my nerves, though, that the summer has been full of stories about shark attacks.

Just for Rob K., who is a legacy Modern Woodmen, I’m posting Modern Woodmen news from over in Elsinore:

Of course, a gift to a small museum does not emphasize the old fraternal part of the fraternal benefits organization, but they’re still around and doing good things.

I think they should have proper walk-on music, though. Something almost along the lines of this:

That’s Gloryhammer with “The Hollywood Hootsman” from their old album Space 1999: Rise of the Chaos Wizards from 2015. I still think of Legends from Beyond the Galactic Terrorvortex as their new album even though it’s five years old. I guess I have actually joined the Ancient Oldmen.

School district’s new grading system gives students a low grade of 40% instead of a zero:

A school district in Missouri adopted a new grading system that prevents students from receiving a zero even if they didn’t do the assignment.

The Kansas City Public School district launched the “no zero policy.’

Essentially, the minimum grade on any given assignment is 40%. The policy is designed to help struggling students catch up, KCTV reported.

I laughed out loud at the story. But it’s not funny.

Sadly, the recent paradigm has been that a student can turn an assigment in late for half credit. So now actually doing the work, albeit late, only will yield one up to an additional 10% for the student’s efforts. So why bother?

Because it makes the administrators look good.

Fatherhood at Fifty Is a Growing Trend, With Impacts on Child Health

We at MfBJN noted the number of grey-haired dads in newspaper full color insert adverts in 2011:

That’s 3 of 6 of the images that have a father and a small child in them. Note that roughly half of these fathers of small children in the Macy’s world have greying or white hair.

(Link via Instapundit.)

If you see this color painted on a tree in the woods, your life could be in danger — here’s why:

Forget a red flag — if you see purple, start running.

In nearly two dozen states, a purple marking on a tree or other stationary object out in the wild denotes private property, and depending on where in the United States you are, landowners could be heavily armed.

To be completely safe? Keep out.

PANIC! RED STATES == DANGER!

“If it’s just purple paint with no signage, people may be less likely to understand what that is unless the state itself and organizations across the state have done a significant job getting that info across to all visitors,” he said.

Not to mention, determining where public land ends and private property begins is pricey, but to allow landowners to mark their territory themselves could create another host of issues.

Maybe you should learn a little something about where you’re going before wandering into the woods.

Jeez, I am not a hiker, and I know what the purple means. And I’ve pointed it out to my children what it means so they would know.

Anyone who insists on signage every couple of feet so that wanderers off of the path in a state park can see them does not actually understand how expensive that would be for a land owner. Or think that they’re entitled to that sort of coddling no matter the cost.