Category: News

According to The Daily Mail:

The Arsenio Hall Show ran for five years between 1989 and 1994 and featured hundreds of celebrities in what Hall hoped would be a house party on TV every night.

Hall made his show the home of hip-hop and helped break rappers like Snoop Dogg, Tupac and Ice Cube while musical guests included James Brown, Whitney Houston, and Luther Vandross.

The show would win two Emmys and lead Hall to star in hit movies like 1988 comedy, Coming to America, alongside Murphy.

Incredible! His show from 1989-1994 lead him to star in a hit movie in 1988! Time travel is real, sheeple!

Also, this photo caption should have alt-text that says, “Explain to me how you’re 23 years old and never say Delirous or Raw“:

Hall became known for his on-screen collaboration with Eddie Murphy, but recalls a boozy, drug-fueled night with the comedian despite the star’s clean-cut image at the time

Ay, child. Explain to me how it was in times I lived in and you did not.

(Link via Ed Driscoll on Instapundit.)

Sword yoga is the hot, new fitness trend turning NYC women into swashbuckling fighters — with the help of a double-edged blade

Pretty girls in movie poses with swords. Okay. Feeling empowered because they move like action heroes do in the movies.

I’m no EMEA expert, but I have fenced a little bit in my time, and I’ve fought in some broadsword bouts, and they were over pretty quick and did not involve spinning the blade. Or moving it far out of a guard position.

Chuck Norris has passed away after MfBJN has mentioned him twice this year: Someone’s Trying To Be A Chuck Norris Superfan in January and a review of Way of the Dragon, the Bruce Lee film that got Chuck Norris, 7 time American Karate champion, into films, earlier this month. The film still from the above article is from Way of the Dragon. The eulogies all mention that he was in Walker, Texas Ranger most likely because those were in syndication when the journalists were growing up two years ago.

Don’t let MfBJN happen to you.

As a reminder, actor Robert Blake and author Larry McMurtry passed away after a mention on this blog. Someone stay with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who costarred in Lee’s Game of Death and maybe Dick Van Dyke since I read a Diagnosis Murder book recently.

And let it be known it was Friar who mentioned Susanna Hoffs in a comment; I did not mention her by name on the blog. Oh, no. What have I done?

‘It’s not safe’: Neighbors raise speeding concerns after car crashes into South St. Louis County home:

ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. — Neighbors along Kingston Drive are calling for changes after a crash sent a car into a front porch, marking the latest in a series of crashes along the busy stretch.

St. Louis County Police said since 2025, there have been 22 crashes on Kingston Drive. Of those, nine involved injuries, totaling 14 people hurt, and one crash was fatal.

That deadly crash happened last month when a man was killed, and police said it was the result of speeding.

In 2023, one woman was killed after her car crashed into a home near the intersection of Kingston Drive and Telegraph Road. At the time, police said the vehicle was traveling southbound on Kingston Drive toward Telegraph Road at an “extremely high rate of speed.” However, police explained that it may have been due to a medical emergency.

That’s just down the road from here because Telegraph Road ran between Jefferson Barracks (and beyond) in the St. Louis area and Fort Smith, Arkansas. However, down here, it’s called Old Wire Road, and when it was a contiguous route beside the telegraph wire poles, it ran through my neighbor’s yard.

I used to live up there in Lemay, where this story takes place. My sainted mother died in a house a couple of blocks away. And my favorite aunt owned two different houses in the area, including the one I lived in with my mother for a time.

The roads have been what they are for a long time. What’s different now is the people driving on them.

US drivers see gas prices jump to their highest level since 2023 as Iran conflict drags on

Oh, I see. So: Gas prices are climbing to a level not seen since the last administration, where they got there somehow on their own without a conflict, and as the conflict drags on which means the conflict has lasted longer than the TikTok videos AP journalists train themselves on, I guess.

What we should think: Trump bad. Never mind that in 2023, gas prices were high for some reason which was not Trump. Maybe the threat of Trump? Go with that.

Two articles about the wonders of the MU Health Care saving lives right next to each other? Mmm hmmm.

I am probably slow to discover this, but newspaper stories about death announcements, especially on the front/home page, come in to flavors.

“Neil Sedaka dies” (and for or five news items about it), and “Iconic Folk Singer and Woodstock Legend dead at 84”:

It’s Country Joe MacDonald who passed away. Have I heard his name? Probably. Would I consider him some sort of legend or icon? Eh….

It’s all about the click-through rates, no doubt. When the name is known, people will click to learn more. When the name is kinda known, maybe, the key is to hype up the person’s fame to get us to click through to find out more.

I wonder if there’s a scoring algorithm for the dividing line, or if it’s still a gut feeling by an editor somewhere.

But, hey, it worked on me. Not often, and mostly in this case because I wanted to write this post.

It’s better than looking at crime stories and finding someone I know, which happens, but I watched this story expecting to see someone I knew: Nixa, Mo., Dungeons & Dragons event raises awareness for multiple sclerosis

And I did, sorta: Christopher Wilson, author of The Wards of Iasos Book 1: The Leftovers, makes an appearance.

This story was easier: On Your Side: Conduent Data Breach: What to do if you got a letter–my oldest son makes an appearance, and he was very excited and told me so.

Walmart switching to digital shelf labels nationwide:

Walmart said the digital shelf labels are controlled through a centralized system and will allow for faster price changes.

The digital labels will also help employees stock shelves and fulfill online orders more quickly.

It’s not about the stocking, and it’s not about the picking.

Hey, did you notice that the aisles in Walmart are wider these days? Remember when they narrowed a few years back, which made it hard for us to get through them, but now they’re wider? I don’t suppose that has anything to do with the giant carts that the online ordering employees have started wheeling around? Of course it has. For your convenience.

You know, an aunt of mine by marriage got a promotion out of being a checker at Walgreens in the 1990s into being a Price Administrator. It was her full-time job, in a Walgreens (not a large department store), to adjust the prices of sales items for the week and to audit the prices on the shelves to make sure that they showed the actual price for the item. A full-time job. The electronic tags would eliminate that position, if it hasn’t already been eliminated.

Equifax accused of price gouging Medicaid programs

Equifax is being accused of price gouging regarding Medicaid programs.

Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote a letter to the company’s chief executive asking for answers regarding its business practices.

* * * *

Many states use an Equifax program called The Work Number, which quickly verifies a Medicaid applicant’s work hours and wages.

According to a probe by The New York Times quoted in the senators’ letter, Equifax often raises the price for The Work Number.

So Equifax raises prices, gouging all customers (it follows the shake-every-nickel-from-clients philosophy so prevalent in big tech, after all), and some of the clients happen to be states, who happen to use it to distribute Fedbux…..

Yeah, some senators want to Do Something, which is likely to extract a settlement of some sort, on behalf of their constituents, which are people who receive Fedbux.

Full disclosure: I used to work for the company that made The Work Number for Everyone, which Equifax bought. That company’s stock endowed a scholarship with my father-in-law’s name on it, and Equifax stock which I received in exchange for my old company’s stock has been instrumental in funding my current Travis-McGeelike “retirement.”

Missouri families push senators to support diabetes treatment bill:

Missourians are asking the state’s two senators to help pass what they call a life-changing bill. Supporters say it would make long-term treatment for diabetics more accessible.

Senator Ted Budd from North Carolina and Mike Lee from Utah introduced the Islet Act in November 2025. This would change the wording on pancreatic cell transplants.

* * * *

However, currently, those transplants are categorized as a drug instead of an organ, which affects insurance coverage.

“It’s not done as much here in the United States because of this issue of categorizing the islets as drugs rather than as an organ, which that’s what they are,” Yosten said.

Making everyone pay for this treatment will make insurance rates go up.

I mean, I hope everyone who wants, needs, or gets this treatment is healed, but this bill is about making everyone pay more so they can get it. Not making the treatment available.

So I expect it to pass; Schmitt, as you know, was proud of similar efforts he led in the past.

Jeff at Coffee and Covid today quotes an enthusiastic Tesla supporter:

“Two Sundays ago, I went to Tesla with Elon and visited the Optimus lab,” Calicanis said. “There were a large number of people working on a Sunday,” he continued, “and I saw Optimus. I can tell you now, nobody will remember that Tesla ever made a car. They will only remember the Optimus.”

At the time, most folks dismissed Jason’s remarks as overheated investor hype. But now that Elon put Tesla’s money where its robots are, the comments seem strangely prescient. “He is going to make a billion of those robots,” Calicanis told the hosts. “And it is going to be the most transformative technology product ever made in the history of humanity.”

You know what would make that even better? Put the robots on the Segway Human Transporter.

Remember those? Not long after the turn of the century, luminaries in the tech field and tech press told us that cities would be designed around them (little did we know that a quarter century later, the “fifteen minute cities” would be designed, but not around the SHT, but around controlling the population) and that everyone would have them and blah blah blah.

In reality: In 2026, you can hardly even find them in tourist attractions for “Segway Tours” because they’ve been eclipsed by the far simpler electric bikes and, heaven help up, rentable electric scooters.

But the people who got paid got paid. And whether the humanoid robots transform the world or are a flashy toy replaced by simpler machines later, the people who will get paid will get paid.

All the phones (and “smart” devices) are listening to you:

Google has agreed to pay $68m (£51m) to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly listened to people’s private conversations through their phones.

Users accused Google Assistant – a virtual assistant present on many Android devices – of recording private conversations after it was inadvertently triggered on their devices.

They claimed the recordings were then shared with advertisers in order to send them targeted advertising.

Among other things. The recordings were probably parsed and scored in various ways and were used to train various LLMs as well.

(Link via Pixy’s Daily Tech News today.

Jeff at Coffee and Covid mentions Fort Snelling today:

War Secretary Hegseth approved ICE’s use of Fort Snelling (near Minneapolis) as a forward operating base for ICE agents. This means protesters can no longer torture ICE agents at their hotels— and that Trump isn’t backing down. The Chronicle called it, “a sign of President Donald Trump’s Minnesota immigration siege digging in.”

Ed Lund served there.

Alex Berenson, on Substack, talks about the current health system payment model and sez:

But paying $15,000 a year for care that feels worse than nothing simply seems wrong. At this point, I’m likely to opt out. And I am not alone.

Jeez, I miss paying that little for health insurance for our family of four. I paid more than that five years ago, my last go-round with paying the whole bill myself. Which doubled, effectively, after the passage of the “Affordable” Care Act. And has doubled again since 2025.

Berenson talks about the money sloshing to the top of the industry, but does not specifically call out the increase in premiums which coinkidinkally just about matched the government subsidies sloshed out of the ACA bucket. Nor does he call out the specific things which are mandatory by law that must be included in insurance coverage, which also drives the price of insurance up for everyone. Here in the state of Missouri, everyone pays for autism treatments because our senator, Eric Schmitt, wrote/sponsored a bill to make it mandatory in Missouri. Yay! Increased costs! This was before the ACA, by the way, and before he became a national legislator.

Bill Glahn, the new guy at Powerline, posts California Forever:

I’ve been fascinated by this story since stumbling upon it a few years ago. From SFGate,

A new Bay Area city backed by a secretive group of billionaires will be built “non-stop” for 40 years, the project’s CEO said in a news release Wednesday. The announcement further reveals the long-term commitment of California Forever’s backers to creating a new city of 400,000 people, even after polling overwhelmingly indicated locals weren’t interested in the idea.

Wasn’t this a plot device in one of those Roger Moore-era James Bond movies?

Building a brand-new city in California in 2026 would seem to be the ultimate triumph of hope over experience.

* * * *

It’s like the story behind central Florida’s The Villages, but with tech bros instead of old people.

Actually, it sounds more like Irvine, California to me, but I just read Honeymoon with My Brother, whose author was a lobbyist for the Irvine Corporation, which owned the land and built he city.

Also, I cannot help but wonder if he is confusing The Villages which grew out of some real-estate-by-mail lots in the 1960s with Celebration, Florida, which was laid out, built, and sold by Disney.

:

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (KCTV) – A new report found Missouri schools lost $35 million in lottery funding, despite a $5 million advertising boost.

State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick said the findings raise questions about whether increased advertising actually boosts lottery sales and education funding.

The audit found that lottery transfers to education remained relatively consistent in years with reduced advertising spending. However, in that dropped in Fiscal Year 2024 when advertising appropriations were partially restored.

By the Numbers
The audit found that in Fiscal Year 2024:

• Advertising spending jumped to $5.4 million, up from about $400,000 in the previous year
• Total lottery revenue dropped by $49 million
• Transfers to education fell by $35.3 million to $389.8 million

It’s because the newer national lotteries, Mega Millions and Powerball, get the splash in the news when their regular high payouts draw attention, and although (I think) Missouri gets a cut of the ticket sales, it’s lower than the MO Millions (the new $2 ticket which replaced the Missouri Lotto) generates.

And I think they’re about to get worse news once the impact of the sportsbook gambling is felt/tallied/appears in the monthly or annual reports. They probably have already seen something of it.

Opened in 2023 to fill a food desert, this Sentry Foods is now closing:

Less than three years after it opened to fill a food desert on Milwaukee’s northwest side, the Sentry Foods at 6350 West Silver Spring Drive is abruptly closing its doors.

The closure is the latest in a swath of grocery stores shutting down across the city, largely affecting lower income neighborhoods with little access to fresh foods. An Aldi store just two miles away shuttered last week, and other neighborhoods have protested Pick ‘n Save closures.

I thought about the address, and that’s the shopping center across the street from Westlawn (now, apparently, reconstructed as Westlawn Gardens) which was one of the sister housing developments to Berryland, the projects in which I lived. Didn’t get out that way much when I lived in Berryland–I guess my dad’s friend Gene lived a couple blocks east of it and north–but I passed the place when I was in school–I want to say it was a Kohl’s grocery store at the time, but land’s sakes, child, that was in the 1900s.

They quote a note attached to the door:

“This decision was not made lightly. Many factors were carefully considered before coming to this difficult conclusion. Saying goodbye is truly painful, and we are deeply sorry to bring this news to the community that has supported us over the years,” the notice reads.

But the rest of the article is mostly the usual food desert, food desert, food desert nonsense, but no real analysis of why groceries struggle in those areas. Because if the real reasons were explained, people might not want the journalists’ preferred solutions.

What are the people buying? If it’s not fresh meat and fresh vegetables, but rather processed food, snacks, soda, beer, and cigarettes, you can buy those things at a convenience store. At a significant markup, sure, but you might need that markup in a grocery store to account for shrinkage, both due to theft and to spoilage of perishables.

And I get it from the customer side, too. I have schlepped a 25lb frozen turkey (my Christmas bonus) four miles from the store to my father’s house in the cold and the snow. You cannot carry a week’s worth of groceries several miles walking or on the bus, and making more frequent trips might take two or three hours or so, a huge time sink every day or couple of days.

Not sure what the solution is at the societal or government level–or if any such solution would make things better and not worse (except for those administering the solutions, of course–it’s always better for them), but at the individual level, it’s a strong social network or family ties.

Congress is debating the possible consequences for ICE and even Noem after Renee Good’s killing

Behold, the “Associated” “Press” characterizes “Congress” as:

“The situation that took place in Minnesota is a complete and total disgrace,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said as details emerged. “And in the next few days, we will be having conversations about a strong and forceful and appropriate response by House Democrats.”

* * * *

“The videos I’ve seen from Minneapolis yesterday are deeply disturbing,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, in a statement.

* * * *

“We’ve been warning about this for an entire year,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla.

* * * *

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the subcommittee that handles Homeland Security funding, plans to introduce legislation to rein in the agency with constraints on federal agents’ authority, including a requirement that the Border Patrol stick to the border and that DHS enforcement officers be unmasked.

* * * *

“More Democrats are saying today the thing that a number of us have been saying since April and May: Kristi Noem is dangerous. She should not be in office, and she should be impeached,” said Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez, who represents parts of Chicago where ICE launched an enhanced immigration enforcement
action last year that resulted in two deaths.

* * * *

“I’m not completely against deportations, but the way they’re handling it is a real disgrace,” said Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-Texas, who represents a district along the U.S.-Mexico border [sic]

“Right now, you’re seeing humans treated like animals,” he said.

* * * *

To Rep. Chuy Garcia, D-Ill., Good’s death “brought back heart-wrenching memories of those two shootings in my district.”

“It looks like the fact that a US citizen, who is a white woman, may be opening the eyes of the American public, certainly of members of Congress, that what’s going on is out of control,” he said, “that this isn’t about apprehending or pursuing the most dangerous immigrants.”

So “Congress” in this context is a hella lotta Democrats plus Lisa Murkowski, a “Republican.”

Who are going to introduce legislation. And to impeach.

This is “debate.”

This is “Associated” “Press.”

Springfield city leaders aim get lodging tax increase back in front of voters this Spring:

The future of a new Springfield convention center is still being considered.

Last November, voters shot down a 3-percent hotel-motel tax increase. Now, the city is hoping to provide the information needed to present the issue again to voters on the April ballot.

Because it was not a yes, clearly the voters meant maybe.

I’m not going to go into my litany of reasons to oppose pretty much any tax money to fund convention center money sinkholes, but I have seen this over and over again.

Note that one of the “city leaders” quoted is the “city manager” which is a hired position, and not an elected position. So not only is he unaccountable to the voters directly, but Springfield might only be a stepping stone in his career. And bringing home a convention center despite opposition–boy, what a great bullet point on the ol’ resume.