Category: News

But it looks like England vs. France might just pay out:

BORIS Johnson has deployed the Royal Navy to protect Jersey from the threat of a French blockade.

The dramatic move came after French fishermen – backed by Macron’s ministers – vowed to shut off the island unless they could fish more British waters, a threat branded an “act of war”.

The furious spat erupted after the island – which is under Britain’s protection – slapped French trawlers with post-Brexit fishing licences requirements.

About 100 French fishing vessels are due to sail to Jersey’s port on Thursday as part of a protest against the new rules, the head of fisheries for the Normandy region, Dimitri Rogoff has said.

In the face of increasingly bellicose French threats, two patrol vessels will sent to monitor the situation and protect the islands 100,000 citizens who depend wholly on imports for food, medicine and even electricity.

I did not see that coming!

Okay, now, let’s look through the signs and portents and penumbras and emanations to determine who is the Russian and or Chinese proxy in this fight. Cui bono?

Which does not mean “Alexa, play Sonny and Cher,” by the way.

St. Louis County votes to halt evictions:

Some households in St. Louis County are waking up with a sigh of relief after St. Louis County leaders voted to halt evictions through June.

In a 4-2-1 vote Tuesday night, the county council voted to approve a measure to temporarily suspend evictions until June 30.

Why will it end in June? Spoiler alert: It won’t.

So what is a landlord to do? Raise the rent, or let the properties fall to ruin because they can’t put out people who don’t pay the rent?

Maybe both!

NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity completes third successful flight:

NASA completed the third successful flight of its Mars helicopter Ingenuity on Sunday.

The NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., announced the successful flight in a tweet Sunday morning, declaring that the helicopter “continues to set records” flying faster and farther.

C’mon, man, Martian records that we know of are currently pretty easy to break, ainna?

But let’s look to the future: That little thing should have a couple Hellfire missiles on it.

Because later rovers will have that capability (China invokes mythic god of war and fire for its Mars rover name).

(Former link from Instapundit; the latter because I hit the New York Post Web site a couple times a day. Kind of like when I got my first desk job connected to the Web in 1998.)

The current administration is working hard to get teams signed up for World War III: Biden recognizes atrocities against Armenians as genocide

Well, I guess that pushes a NATO member towards the Chinese/Russian side.

Currently, we’ve got the teams as follows:

Allies:	Other Side:
United States	Russia China Turkey

Although we really have to come up with actual allies to call our side “the Allies”. We could add Taiwan, briefly. And we’d need to come up with a name for the other side since Axis is played out and Axis of Evil, too.

Ah, well, the winners will write the history of any future global conflict. Let’s leave it to them.

According to Writer’s Digest, they have limitations on poetry imports:

Due to U.S. Government restrictions we are unable to accept entries from Syria, Iran, North Korea, or Crimea.

One of those is not a country. It’s a part of Russia. Or will be soon because Trump was a Putin puppet who somehow prevented it.

Ted Nugent, who once dismissed COVID-19, gets virus:

In the video shot at his Michigan ranch, the “Cat Scratch Fever” singer repeatedly uses racist slurs to refer to COVID-19 and reiterates his previous stance that he wouldn’t be getting the vaccine because he claims wrongly that “nobody knows what’s in it.”

Nugent, a supporter of ex-President Donald Trump, previously called the pandemic a scam and has railed against public health restrictions. He has repeated a narrative pushed by conservative media and disputed by health experts that suggests the official death count from the coronavirus is inflated.

So much rightthinking in that “news,” I feel mindcleaner for having read it.

UPDATE: Immediately after posting this, I happened over to Facebook and saw one of my now-Internet acquaintances commenting on another medium’s covering of the story with his own, “Haw, haw!” I used to think so much better of people. On the other hand, I vote for Trump twice, so he would think me irredeemable were he to think of me at all.

My beautiful wife, the park board member, attended a news conference this week as Bass Pro Shops donated kayaks and gear for rental at the local lake where my boys and I never catch fish.

You can read the story here: Bass Pro donates kayaks, funds for kids’ programs for Springfield parks.

She is dressed casually because she was told she might get to try one of the kayaks for photos. I think she was disappointed that she did not.

ESPN talkers discuss whether Aaron Rodgers has a brighter future with the Packers or with ‘Jeopardy’ and if he is good enough to be the host:

Aaron Rodgers’ future may or may not be in “Jeopardy.”

He is the only guest host openly campaigning to become permanent host.

“I would love to be the host of ‘Jeopardy!’ yes,” Rodgers said.

Clearly, this sports writer doesn’t know much about Jeopardy! or the current state thereof or he would realize that another person is actively campaigning to be host–but his guest spot has not come into the rotation yet. But the sports journalist is probably rather busy reporting on sports, which means a lot of retread speculation on the NFL Draft currently. It’s myopia coupled with the journalist’s ability to speak ex cathedra about anything, since what journalists don’t know isn’t true or important.

Some of us pay attention. A lot of attention. Some of us could point out that Jeopardy! did not hold its annual online competition for contestants this year. Or maybe some of us were specifically not invited. Which some of us might suspect.

Seen at Instapundit, this just in: Scientists turn beer waste into new protein sources, biofuels.

You know, the Australians have been doing that for 100 years.

Living on a desert island surrounded by salt water pretty much means Australians have had to invent many, many nasty things to eat, or they would starve.

However, one does not get Federal grants now unless one does something “new,” and instead of doing it because they’re going to waste away otherwise, our American scientists are doing it for the environment. Natch.

So my boys were both off of school on Good Friday, and since it was two weeks out from our adventures on spring break, I wanted to take them somewhere if I could think of it. I mean, we have the Springfield places that we’ve either gone often, doesn’t interest them, or is priced for tourists.

So I thought about a road trip.

I thought about going out to Poplar Bluff to have lunch with my brother or nephew, but it’s six hours round trip, and we had church service in the evening. So I looked around for used book stores or places to go that might have interesting things to do. Bolivar apparently has a used book store that is a seamstress’s sideline and a couple parks. But I saw the It’s a Mystery book store down in Berryville, Arkansas. It’s only about an hour and a half away, and it looks like Berryville has plenty of places to eat and a town square to walk around. So I piled the boys into the car with their old road trip Game Boys and, when everyone asked our destination, told them, “It’s a Mystery.” That was about the best part of it.

So they’re guessing as we start down Highway 160. Is it Branson? Is it a museum? And then the youngest, still at the private school, asks, “Is it out of the state?”

“Do you want to go out of the state?” I asked, playing coy.

“If I go to another state, I have to quarantine for two weeks from school,” he said.

Oh, yes, now I remembered that edict from the school. Of course, I hadn’t thought of it because we weren’t “traveling” in the vacation sense; we were taking a day trip on a lark. So I screeched the brakes as we approached the Welcome to Arkansas sign, barely averting the disaster of having him home for two weeks.

Well, it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but I did have to abort the mission and curse the arbitrary PANDEMIC!!!!! protocols which determined that a small town seventy miles away was more dangerous than big cities three hours away on other states’ borders.

So we ended up driving an hour and a half taking the long way around to a diner thirty minutes from our home in Marionville, which did not impress us, and then driving to run a couple of errands in town.

So I basically spent four hours in the car yesterday going nowhere.

It’s not the adventure we’d hoped for, but at least the goal and the result will have been memorable.

Anticipation is building for a boom in US hiring this year

US jobless claims rise to 719K as coronavirus still forces layoffs

The magic of the anticipation far outstrips the reality.

Remember this?

Me, I’m going long on Unexpectedly futures.

Inside the $1.6bn ghost town abandoned in 2008 – before anyone moved in:

The Ozarks region of Missouri was set to become home to a prosperous town featuring a shopping mall, a 390-room hotel, the country’s second-largest indoor water park – and dozens of castle-like townhouses.

But the $1.6bn investment went to waste as the town remains uninhabited almost 15 years later.

The Indian Ridge Resort was hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis hit; resulting in defaulted loans and a halt in the construction work.

As someone who watches the bankruptcy auctions from time to time, I still see a lot of those lots coming available for only the past taxes due.

I am not sure why this is news in England today for some reason. Perhaps the new deadly COVID variants are not as bad as advertised. Like COVID itself.

Bullet strikes window of Dollar General store in northwest Springfield, Mo.:

bullet struck a front window of the Dollar General store at 2535 W. Kearney Street in Springfield, Mo. Monday night.

The bullet did not penetrate the window, right by the front door. Police say the bullet came from a low powered weapon, possibly a BB gun, fired from someone driving by the store.

BB guns fire small round balls powered by compressed air. Not bullets. But one would not expect journalists to know that.

Beverly Cleary, author of children’s book ‘Henry Huggins,’ dead at 104

Larry McMurtry, Novelist And Screenwriter Of The West, Has Died At Age 84

I can’t help but notice that the former article is in the New York Post and features a picture of Beverly Cleary with George W. Bush and the latter article is from NPR, which tops the article with a picture of McMurtry with President Obama. So I guess we know how to feel about the death.

I actually have been reading The Last Picture Show for a couple of days, and I absolutely hate it. McMurtry’s death is only one of the coincidences with my reading of the book. I’ll mention the other in the book report.

Cleary was 104, and McMurtry was 84.

But from today’s NY Post celebrity snaps, we have:

Snoop Dogg with his granddaughter.

Ha, ha! You’re old, old man. I still have kids in school, and can pretend like I’m young for a couple of years yet.

‘Dad bods’ are the biggest turn-on for singles in the pandemic sex era:

Embrace the bulge: Scales have once again been tipped in favor of the common man.

Nearly 75% of singles are more turned on by a “dad bod” over any other body type — including a mate with rock-hard washboard abs, according to a sexy new survey of 2,000 people by Dating.com.

Wait a minute, who is the most likely to use a dating site and not go to the latest high-end club to pick up models?

People with normal bodies.

So when they, the dating site, says that “single” especially the ones on their dating sites think a little paunch is sexy, don’t you think the paunchy would be more likely to sign up for their dating site?

Could I be more skeptical and cynical if I tried? I shall try!

Two longtime workers dead at Roundy’s Distribution Center in Oconomowoc; suspect takes own life after chase, crash:

Two longtime workers were killed inside the sprawling Roundy’s Distribution Center and the suspect later died by suicide following a car crash in Milwaukee, authorities said Wednesday.

Law enforcement officials skimped on details, but the deaths sent a shock wave through the small suburban community and reminded people across the region of other incidents of workplace violence, especially the deadly shootings at the Molson Coors brewery just over a year ago.

Two law enforcement sources identified the suspect as Fraron Cornelius, 41, of Wauwatosa. A union official said Cornelius had worked at the facility for around 20 years.

Although, to be honest, my father worked for Roundy’s when its warehouse was in Wauwatosa. It moved out to Oconomowoc after he passed away.

When I was living with him, I worked at a Roundy’s-supplied grocery store, so he would sometimes write messages on the pallets coming to my store. Of course, when he would go on strike or get locked out, I’d cross the picket lines to go to work.

Oscar Mayer Weinermobile returns to Springfield! Here’s where to find it:

The Oscar Mayer Weinermobile is rolling through the Springfield area over the next few days.

Oscar Meyer has six weinermobiles touring the country year-round. From Thursday to Saturday, the hot dog on wheels makes it first visit to the Springfield area since 2019.

Spoiler alert: The first stop, yesterday, was at the Walmart on Kearney which lies between the Air and Military Museum of the Ozarks and ABC Books.

So we saw it on our excursion yesterday that took us from one to the other.

The boys, who are young men now, were so excited to see it that they were boys again briefly.