Category: News

Volcanic climate impacts can act as ultimate and proximate causes of Chinese dynastic collapse.

It’s not that the ruling regimes became corrupt and unable to manage or perform the necessary government duties. It was the volcanoes.

I just glanced at it, and I can’t help note that all the data stops at 1911. What, no earthquake in 1949? Weird that when the technology and recorded history gets better at recording actual volcanic eruptions, the charts stop.

I am skeptical about anything about China, especially speculative scientific work by Chinese scientists or historians.

(I saw the link somewhere else first, but it also appeared at Instapundit where Professor Reynolds uses it to advocate for space colonization.)

Next buyer of Prince Charles’ $6.7M former home must let him fish there:

Prince Charles’ glorious former home is up for sale for the first time since he sold it over 27 years ago — but there’s a catch.

Listed at nearly $6.7 million, the next buyer must be OK with his royal highness stopping by to fish.

The listing explains that since the home was built in 1906, it has been owned by the Duchy of Cornwall — an estate that funds “the public, charitable and private activities of the Prince of Wales and his family,” according to its website.

“A quirk remaining from the previous ownership allows his royal highness to retain the right to fish on the property’s riverbank as long as 24-hour notice is given,” a representative for the real estate agency, Knight Frank, told Insider.

In the olden days, of course, the kings and princes could do that at any home they wanted. They were all the king’s fish, after all.

Missouri Job Center to host healthcare hiring event on Tuesday, nine employers expected to attend

They’ve certainly made room for new hires with all the firings for not being vaccinated even though the former employees worked through the worst pandemic EVER!!!! without dying.

Jim Treacher, a RINO who probably wanted Hillary to win, said:

Yesterday I joked about Marvel giving Paste-Pot Pete his own movie because they’re running out of decades-old comics characters to exploit. Well, the joke’s on me, because Marvel just announced a 2022 Halloween special for Disney Plus that will feature… Werewolf By Night. If the character’s name confuses you, he’s a werewolf. Who comes out by night. Which is redundant if you’re at all familiar with the werewolf legends, but whatever.

C’mon, man, he preferred to be called The Trapster.

But if when it comes to Z-level Marvel characters who I’d like to see, it would be The Fabulous Frog-Man or Speedball.

Of course, they would probably be on Disney+, which I won’t subscribe to, or released in theaters, and I’ve been over super hero movies for some time now. So it wouldn’t matter much to me. And given the things I’ve recently picked up in the dollar comic boxes at Nameless City, I might be over comics too.

Which leaves me more time for men’s adventure paperbacks, I guess.

MoDOT hosts public hearing on interchange upgrade on U.S. 60 in Rogersville

C’mon, man, we know what that means in 2021.

Roundabouts. Two, in fact.

A number of places I’ve seen have reported former president Bill Clinton’s recent hospital stay thusly:

Bill Clinton was released from the hospital for an infection that was not COVID.

It was, however, sepsis (mentioned in this Daily Mail article, but not the New York Post article linked above).

Sepsis kills eleven million people every year. But at least it wasn’t COVID.

But it’s important that the headlines and reporting mention that it was not Wuhan Flu.

Because it’s important that we we not doubt that Clinton is part of the sophisticated, vaccinated crowd.

Parson says Missouri is pursuing prosecution after St. Louis reporter finds state data flaw:

Gov. Mike Parson said he was pursuing criminal prosecution against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and its reporters Thursday after the newspaper discovered a data vulnerability in a state website.

Sections of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s website allowed someone visiting the site to search through teacher credentials and certifications, revealing Social Security numbers within the HTML source code of the pages, the Post-Dispatch reported. That source code is available to anyone visiting a website on a web browser.

Yeah, pumping out the social security numbers in hidden fields is bad juju, and it does not require any manner of hacking to get to it.

I wonder why Parson has gone nuclear over this? To shore up his support with educational professionals? C’mon, man.

Trading For Treasure: the pandemic creates a trading card boom:

Get out the old dusty shoeboxes from the attic because a historic trading card boom is underway. One company is cashing in by helping thousands around the world buy and sell little cardboard versions of their beloved sports icons.

Once a beacon of childhood memories for generations, trading cards are now a booming business for the Camann family in Richmond, Virginia.

Wild cards: Spree has police wondering if bistate gaming thefts are linked:

The thief who shattered the glass door and display cases at Realms of Gaming here Monday, swiping thousands of dollars’ worth of collectible trading cards, also may be behind similar break-ins in St. Louis County.

Police in the bistate region will be sharing notes Wednesday to see if the burglaries are the work of the same people, said Troy police Chief Brent Shownes.

“We’re learning of more and more of these,” Shownes said, estimating a half-dozen such burglaries in recent days.

They include break-ins at two game stores on Watson Road. Game Nite at 8380 Watson Road in Marlborough and Yeti Gaming at 8920 Watson Road in Crestwood were burglarized late Sunday night and early Monday.

I still don’t plan on retiring based on the value of my middle 1980s baseball cards. But perhaps I should plan on having to defend them with deadly force.

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.

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Suddenly, living in trailers is a hipster paradise: Micro House On Wheels Built For Off-Grid Living.

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.

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A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction: The Executioner and Mack Bolan

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.

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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.)

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An almost two month old article came to my attention via a Facebook feed: Some white-collar workers are secretly balancing 2 full-time jobs and earning up to $600,000, a report says. They drop in and out of multiple meetings to avoid getting caught.

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.

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After reading John Kass’s recent As the Idiocracy takes the country to the dogs, who wins the Golden Moutza of the Month?, I wanted to learn to do a proper moutza. So here’s Kass himself explaining it:

I still need to learn to properly pronounce feesah etho, though.

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Okay, I think that’s it; I can close all those tabs now.

Now, in a Paul Harvey voice, Good day!

Jogger hit by a car on U.S. 65 near Fair Grove, Mo.

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?

One of the British tabs had a guessing game headline:

GUESS WHO Hunky actor is unrecognisable after he’s transformed into an OAP for new film

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:

SHOVEL WHAMMY Shocking moment driver chases man with a SPADE and smashes his back window after being body slammed in road rage row

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.

A local religious university, under pressure from some vocal but numerically small group or another, changed its mascot from the Crusaders…

to Valor.

Um, yeah, no. Try again. Maybe the Robins.

Or they could go with Golden Eagles, which is what the university I graduated from changed its mascot to to get out from the naked racism of…

the Warriors.

The countdown begins until some vocal but numerically small group starts saying that valor is a white European thing that offends someone.

Jobless Americans will have few options as benefits expire

Workers are seeing higher wages as Springfield businesses struggle to hire amid labor shortage

Few options. As few as all the Now Hiring signs that are on every freaking business in the area.

But one fewer option for free government money, though.

I saw this on the front page of some British tabloid:

And I didn’t have to guess who he played on Doctor Who. He played Sabalom Glitz in the “Trial of a Time Lord” multi-parter.

I haven’t mentioned the character here on the blog in six months.