Category: News

Springfield auto shop reports ‘rampant’ rise in thefts and vandalism

That’s our current preferred garage, exactly five miles away. I know this because sometimes I drop a vehicle off and walk home.

Sometimes, I’ve been known to swap cars, where I drive up, pick one of our cars up and leave the other for service the next day. Perhaps I’ll reconsider that strategy. It will be easier as we will soon have three vehicles and three drivers in the house briefly.

But, man, Springfield’s crime continues to increase.

Confusing siblings is not a matter of racial bias:

Tennis superstar Serena Williams took to Twitter on Wednesday to call out The New York Times for using a photo of her sister, Venus Williams, in an article about her new capital venture fund.

She called on the Times to “do better” with “engrained systems woefully unaware of their biases.”

“No matter how far we come, we get reminded that it’s not enough. This is why I raised $111 million for Serena Ventures,” Williams said on Twitter, adding “even I am overlooked.”

It’s a common mistake. Must we make everything about jargony jargon current rightthink?

C’mon, man, you and I know that’s coming next now that Marquette has redesigned its seal:

Following years of student activism and campus deliberation, Marquette University announced this week that it will change its official seal, most notably by removing an image of the college’s namesake.

The university’s board approved a new seal that, according to an announcement Monday, will “more accurately reflect” the role that Indigenous tribes played in the journey that French Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette embarked upon in 1673 to find the direction and mouth of the Mississippi River.

The prop bet is whether it will stop being a “Catholic” university before or after the renaming.

I’ve actually placed my money on simultaneously.

Funny thing; although the university sends me glossy magazines on occasion, they don’t try to hit me up for money any more.

High-speed pursuit through Springfield ends in arrest of fugitive:

Deputies from the Greene County Sheriff’s Office Fugitive Apprehension Unit attempted to arrest a wanted fugitive with multiple felony warrants in the north Springfield area. When deputies approached the home where the suspect was located, the fugitive Johnnie Coffer, and another man left the residence in a white Chevy Silverado. Investigators say the fugitive drove to the area of Interstate-44 and West Bypass where he abruptly stopped the vehicle, assaulted the driver, and forced him out of the vehicle before fleeing in the victim’s stolen truck. Deputies initiated a traffic stop on the driver but he kept going.

Due to the nature of the charges, (robbery, assault, and multiple felony warrants) the pursuit continued through north Springfield and eventually went into the south Springfield area. During the pursuit, investigators say the fugitive repeatedly called 911 threatening to assault other drivers by crashing into their vehicles as well as threatening “suicide by cop.” The vehicle pursuit ended in the area of Grant Avenue and Dale Street after a trained deputy performed a low-speed TVI (Tactical Vehicle Intervention) maneuver. Investigators say Coffer’s truck collided with one uninvolved motorist at this point causing no injuries and then he intentionally rammed a deputy sheriff’s patrol vehicle head-on, causing no serious injury to the deputy.

After I picked up the youngest from school yesterday, we stopped by the bank on Battlefield. We heard sirens on Battlefield as we conducted our transaction, and as we headed east on Battlefield, 13 police cars from both Springfield and Greene County were headed in the other direction. I speculated that something was happening at the police station a mile down the road, but nah.

An interesting bit about it, though–we looked on the local media stations about what was going on during the course of the evening, but we didn’t find anything. It reached the local television station’s Web site this morning when the news organization printed law enforcement’s statement. And the live shot in the article linked above was from later that evening, a standup outside the police station on Battlefield. C’mon, guys, don’t any of you have a police scanner and someone to jump on big events like that? Nah, the two twenty-four-year-olds are already knocking off by 4:30, and if it ain’t on Twitter, it ain’t happening.

The headline in the Springfield Business Journal article was not specific: Former STL Blues player files for Congress

I would have guessed Kelly Chase, but it’s actually Jim Campbell; the snippet named him, and I remembered his nickname Soupy and his number 10 without any prompting. He played for the Blues in the late 1990s when we watched all the games and had partial season tickets.

I was not impressed with his play, actually, and I’m not impressed that a business owner in the St. Louis area is filing to run with an address in Camden County. It looks carpetbaggish to me, but maybe he does live out there and only has business interests in the St. Louis area.

Kudos to the St. Louis television station for diminishing his entrepreneurship:

The domino effect of U.S. Rep. Vicky Hartzler’s decision to run for Missouri’s U.S. Senate seat instead of seeking re-election to the House in the fourth congressional district appears to have led a former St. Louis Blues hockey player-turned St. Louis County bar owner to run for a seat in Congress.

A bar owner. How seedy-sounding, probably by intention.

Bat falcon spotted in US for first time:

A bird from Central and South America has been spotted in the United States for the very first time.

The “bat falcon” was captured on camera at the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Texas in December, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Driving down the wages for good American falcons.

You know, I amaze my beautiful wife sometimes when I can hear the propane delivery across the house and across the garage buffer zone, a package delivery, or the mail carrier visiting our mailbox sixty or eighty yards down the driveway (that one’s easy, as I can hear the pattern of acceleration and braking–both acceleration, I know, physicists, but give me a break, okay?–as she (Ginger, now Cara) drives from our mailbox to the next.

But an explosion at the power plant up the road? Nah, brah.

Although it was not dramatic; from the picture in the article, it looks like something small in a shed might have gone up.

Meanwhile, the city of Springfield is blowing up another of its power plants on purpose.

Because excess power generation capacity is so civilization, man.

A British tabloid has a headline that clashes with the news immediately after the event: Star Trek legend William Shatner confesses he ‘wasn’t impressed’ after visiting space

Last autumn, when he actually took the trip, our stories were different.

William Shatner delivers spacey monologue to Bezos after Blue Origin launch

“Everybody in the world needs to do this!” a tearful Shatner told the second-richest man in the world while others celebrated over champagne in the background.

“To see the moon come and whip by — now you’re staring into blackness — that’s the thing,” he added.

“The covering of blue, this blanket, this comforter of blue we have around us. We think, ‘Oh, that’s blue sky,’ and all of a sudden you shoot through it and you whip the sheet off you and you’re looking into blackness, into black nothingness.

“As you look down, there’s your blue down there with the black up there. There is Mother Earth and comfort and there is — is there death? I don’t know. Is that the way death is?” he asked.

“It was so moving. This experience, it’s something unbelievable.”

A British tabloid, making something up? Inconceivable!

I would say Everything old is new again, but I’m not feeling renewed.

But my son mentioned a news tidbit, International Space Station will hurtle to Earth in 2031— but it won’t hit you, to me the other day, and I said, as Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit did, “Oh, you mean like Skylab?”

He had no idea what Skylab was. I guess it’s not on TikTok, and history began somewhere in the 21st century.

Eesh, although we try to educate the lads, they beat on, boats against the current, borne back carelessly into the the eternal present.

An update to the story Don’t approach lab monkey missing after crash, people told:

Woman on rabies meds after crashed truck spills crates of monkeys on road

Geez, I hope she’s okay.

Meanwhile, do not approach lab monkeys missing after a crash or people who have been in contact with lab monkeys missing after crash.

Does anyone think the CDC is on this, or are political opinions made into public health threats more important?

Don’t approach lab monkey missing after crash, people told.

If you’re not a lab employee, any interaction with a lab monkey is going to be the start of some awful movie.

They say that the monkey, one of 100 in a trailer, was headed to the lab when the accident occurred. But, c’mon, man, we know that’s exactly what the authorities would say if the opposite were true. The monkey had nothing to do with the lab-American community. We get it.

And we’re all going to get it… whatever it is… the first time someone tries to befriend this monkey.

I saw this headline, Buddhist monk who brought ‘mindfulness’ to the world dies peacefully aged 95 at Vietnamese temple, and I thought, surely not Thich Nat Hanh, but it was.

I’ve read his books Thundering Silence and Peace of Mind: Becoming Fully Present.

I guess I should not have been terribly surprised that he was still around–Peace of Mind was published but eight years ago. Maybe nine. Sorry, I am still on 2021 in my mental arithmetic.

Jeez, this blog is nothing but death notices of late, ainna? Maybe I should lighten things up and tell you about the most Monday Monday I’ve ever had.

Mechanic totals $3.4M Ferrari after smashing into tree stump on test drive

Except in my short story, “Joy Ride”, a valet “borrows” a Corvette for a ride over his break, and instead of totaling it, he puts it in a ditch and scratches it. Which might be totaled depending upon the age and mileage, I suppose.

Man, I wrote a lot of short stories when I was in college, back when I thought people might like to read what I wrote.

Instapundit links to a Joanne Jacobs Teens eat more, exercise less.

Which is weird, because all the NFL public and charitable announcement commercials during football games are no longer about Play60, its program to get kids to exercise. Instead, they’re all about the It Takes All Of Us announcements about programs raising awareness about race.

You mean the first actual, you know, health problem wasn’t solved yet and in fact worsened, but it was superseded by a more contemporary political concern?

What is this world coming to?

You know, I was going to get “Weird Al” Yankovic concert tickets for my family for Christmas, something to stick into their stockings for a nice treat. But the page for the concert says that proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test within 72 hours of the event.

The concert is scheduled for next August. In the next nine months, we can expect the definition of vaccination and COVID test to change once or twice.

You know, I stream WSIE, the Sound, the jazz station in the St. Louis area, and all of the concert announcements feature the same stricture. And I saw an out-of-date ad for the Springfield Contemporary Theatre–although I thought I would go to a lot of performances there when I first learned of it five years ago, I haven’t been back. But in addition to Facebook showing me ads for productions that were over, the theatre also has the vax passport or negative test bit.

You know what doesn’t have bouncers at the door checking your papers? Sporting events. Movie theaters. School events. You know, the things that the proles like.

So I guess I’ll be avoiding the hoity-toity cultural events for the nonce.

(Related: It’s time to abolish ‘emergency’ COVID-19 powers by Glenn Reynolds. Although down here in the Ozarks, most of those things have already been eliminated, although my son has to mask up again for his school since they set Protocols at the beginning of the year, and they must slavishly follow them.)

Nicklaus: The economy is booming. Why are Americans so glum?

Messenger: Of smoking, masks and shifting views of freedom

And to be honest, using “Booming” to describe how the price of everything has gone up in the last year is a bit of a stretch of optimism.

But, yeah, in an inflationary environment, when the elites and journalists are all about explaining how the inflation is good for you and the loss of freedom is good for you, and you’re a racist anyway, why are Americans glum?

Must be the grey skies with little chance of snow.