Category: News

Michigan castle seeks to court new owners for $2.5M

It has secret passages, of course. The New York Post article linked above has a couple sample pictures, but the Zillow sales listing has many, many more.

It’s only $2.5 million, which is a lot less than some of the real estate listings that catch my wistful eye.

Three alligator stories I saw in the news today:

• Emotional support alligator enjoys splash pad at park
• SEE YOU LATER: Alligator shows up on porch of West Plains, Mo. home
• Alligator delays flight on runway at Charleston International Airport

Coupled with the story about the triathlete attacked by a gator from ten days ago, that’s a lot of news about alligators recently.

Ya know, since the shark story frenzy in the news in 2001 that was knocked out of the headlines by the events of September 11, any time I see too many different stories with the same animal in them in the news too frequently, I fear we’re about to get a wake up call from the trivia.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s $1 billion art collection set to be most expensive auction in history

It features at least one Renoir, “The Reader”. I would hide it in the living room on the wall with all the Renoir prints.

You know, I have not done a 5K in a while, so I am definitely not up for this: Proposed Ozark Run Scenic Byway to unite communities and highlight Ozarks region.

My god, how many hundreds of miles is that?

UPDATE: I have just been handed a note. Apparently, this is not a run run; instead, Ozark Run is the proposed name of the tax spending entity or something. Still, I had better take it easy.

MAULED BY MONSTER Terrifying moment triathlete is attacked by 12ft long alligator that clamped its jaws down onto his head

Actually, I have only done (small) triathlons with pool swims; no open water swims or practices for me.

And although I have an indoor triathlon, with a pool swim, coming up in five weeks, I have not swimmed swam swum (pick the right one) since February 21.

So I’m not sure how easier I can take it.

Videos show Jason Momoa unscathed after head-on motorcycle crash

Mimosa was in a 1970 Oldsmobile. One would guess he would be okay unless the rider came through the windshield and landed on his lap.

The motorcyclist was taken to the hospital with minor injuries, which indicates that it was a relatively low-speed collision.

One wonders what kind of fiction a writer such as myself would create with a with a writer’s retreat like this:

In what looks like a scene out of Martin Scorcese’s “Shutter Island,” a decommissioned World War II fort in the middle of the ocean is being auctioned off for first time, starting at just $60,000.

Located in the Humber Estuary of Northern England, the concrete vessel was initially constructed between 1915 and 1919 for naval defense during World War I, though it wouldn’t go into use until WWII.

Considered a historic listing, the property is defined by the United Kingdom as a “grade II” building or structure that is “of special interest, warranting every effort to preserve it.”

It’s about sixty thousand dollars, but probably more to have it fixed up. It has water from its own artesian well, which means you don’t have to have it brought in. N

So it’s like Sealand except a little more sheltered from the open sea, it would seem, and a tad less than the billion dollar asking price.

But my beautiful wife says no, so I guess we’ll stay landlocked.

Teen turned away from water slide because of weight, family says:

A family in Illinois said their 13-year-old daughter was turned away from a ride at Raging Rivers Waterpark after being told to step on a scale in front of strangers.

* * * *

The scale read 205, but Batton said they were told there was a 200-pound weight limit.

A spokesperson for Raging Rivers said the decision was made to prioritize the safety of guests.

Jeez, Louise, this story is out there to ding The Man, in this case the operators of an amusement park with safety rules that single people out based on physicism, which takes into account things like mass and gravity to stigmatize individuals of a certain size and to prevent them from plunging to their deaths or turning their little rafts over in dangerous conditions.

I mean, it’s been months since we were seeing the opposite story in the news (Adjusted sensors on ride contributed to Fla. teen’s death in fall) wherein the large teen in question died instead of ran crying to the news about being embarrassed.

Full disclosure: This summer I was in a water park whose new rotating water slide wheel had a weight limit. I don’t remember whether it was posted on every landing climbing to the ride or whether it was just at the top, but my family was too heavy cumulatively to ride in one raft. And, yes, the staging area for getting into the raft was a scale, with the numbers where everyone could see them.

I’m not here to pick on large people.

I am here, however, to decry sensationalist media who will run both stories in succession: The story of dangerous theme park rides killing kids who are too large for them, and then running stories about mean theme parks not allowing kids on rides which would pose an extra danger for them.

Clearly, the media and its friends have picked the weakest candidate for the general election for Senate in the state of Missouri, and, now, they’re pumping him for all its worth to try to get him to win the primary

Greitens fans shrug off scandals threatening GOP Senate seat

Eric Greitens resigned as Missouri governor amid criminal charges and legislative investigations, is accused by his ex-wife of abuse and bullying, and has run a widely condemned ad suggesting he was hunting members of his own party with a gun. And the Republican is still a leading contender for election to the U.S. Senate.

Yeah, no. And by “Yeah, no,” I mean, I really hope not.

But it’s worked before: Claire McCaskill bragged that she got Todd Akin onto the ballot.

Jeez, I hope it does not work again.

Then, the stories were all about how Missouri’s gas taxes were low compared to other states, and it’s a bad thing.

• Why Does Missouri Have The Lowest Gas Prices In The Country?
• Missouri gas tax should be raised
• Editorial: Missouri needs a higher gas tax to pay for better roads and safer bridges
• Leading to: Proposed gas tax increase in Missouri could raise price in 2021

Now, the papers are all aflutter: Missouri’s gas tax going up again Friday as hike in Illinois suspended for 6 months.

I always note stories that talk about low taxes as though raising tax rates should be a competition between taxing authorities (note I did not say “governments,” as through the miracles of modern “governance,” non-elected authorities can tax citizens, which I thought led to a revolution sometime in the distant past, before Thefacebook), with the media acting as cheerleaders for more taxes. Until they don’t, and their little minds have no hobgoblins, no sir.

Dangerous species of worm found in Arkansas

It’s the places where they haven’t been found yet that should be frightened. Because they’re there, hiding, waiting to kill you.

Neo discovers the expansive definition of ‘urban’ to government bean counters:

I recently came acro<.ss a statistic indicating that “In 2020, about 82.66 percent of the total population in the United States lived in cities and urban areas.” That rather astounded me. But what I didn’t know (and what a commenter – sorry, I forget who it was) pointed out was that the statistic is based on a definition of “urban” that counts any town with a population over 2,500.

As you might remember, gentle reader, I discovered this definition ten years ago, after the 2010 census, and presented a series for my defunct Missouri Insight blog that I imported here on gritty urban clusters of southwest Missouri:

• Gritty Urban Scenes from Southwest Missouri (Republic, Missouri)
• A Photojournalism Study of Urban Aurora
• Vistas of the Recently Urban Rogersville

Ah, in those days, I ferried my young boys around for small, one-hour road trips to see little towns and, briefly, to talk about them on the blog I started after leaving the group blog 24th State. It got little traffic, though, so I got away from it a bit. But I’ve made up for it, I suppose, by taking all the small town newspapers I do (about 11 at last count).

At any rate, Neo concludes:

How many people are aware of these definitions? I certainly wasn’t. And how do they affect our perception of statistics and their meaning? When we read that America is so overwhelmingly urban, it conjures up one sort of country. If the cutoff for “urban” was at a higher number, it would change the statistics and bring to mind a different sort of country.

As I said in 2012:

So why does the Census Bureau want you to think that these are urban areas?

Because government leaders favor urban solutions.

Consider how much money is spent at the state and federal level on mass transit, particularly light rail trains or what have you. Mass transit makes sense in a densely populated urban area, like a real city, but makes no sense for Republic. How many train stops or bus stops are you going to put to serve the widely scattered population?

Consider fuel economy mandates, the drive for smaller automobiles, and higher fuel prices. A small electric car might make sense when you only put 5,000 miles a year on a car in short trips through a city. But out in the country, your electric car might not make it to the next town.

Consider the Missouri Department of Transportation, who spends millions of dollars on dynamic message signs for urban areas. The Springfield signs spend about 362 days a year displaying MODoT public service announcements. I’ve only seen three other messages on them in the time they’ve been up. One day when it was snowing, the signs announced a weather advisory. Once, I saw a test message. But just this week I did see a message about an auto accident. This same department of transportation also spends millions of state dollars and millions of Federal dollars on sound walls to benefit urban residents who bought near a highway. But when it comes to maintaining actual, you know, roads in rural areas, say hello to tolls.

If you live in southwest Missouri, you’re used to being battered and bullied by statewide ballot initiative wherein the residents of St. Louis and Kansas City dictate, based on their consciences, the livelihoods of residents throughout the state (the recent furor over 2010’s Proposition B comes to mind, as does this musing of a now-retired Indiana farmer). Actual urbanites take vote their simple hearts according to their personal urban experience without knowing, or mostly even caring, what impact it has on the people out in the country.

Now that the Federal Government has declared that we’re all city-dwellers now, these urban solutions can be applied even more lavishly. Of course, the fiscal outlays will continue to go to the actual cities, where the votes are, but the government officials who tell themselves that they want to do what’s best will govern conscience-free, knowing that their pet urbanism applies to everyone.

Further thought: Did this small series inspire Lileks’s current weekly feature on small town downtowns? Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so? But, no.

Steve Pokin: Faced with horrifying scene, jury shows resilience in murder trial:

On Wednesday morning, it was the civic duty of the 12 women and two men in the jury box to look closely at photos of the body of Barbara Foster, who was run over and killed on Nov. 20, 2018.

(Fourteen are in the box because only the judge knows who the two alternates are.)

Deiter Duff, the Greene County medical examiner, calmly used words to describe the pictures, which revealed far more than could ever be said in even a 1,000 grisly words.

. . . .

Years ago, when I was a reporter in Southern California, I wrote a story that had the headline: The Jurors’ Trial.

I went back in old court records and found the names of jurors who had served in three or four of the most grisly and/or disturbing murder trials in our coverage area over the past 25 years.

One of the murder victims was a little girl who was assaulted and then strangled with the shoe laces from her tennis shoes. That’s how she was found. That’s the photo the jurors saw.

I wanted to know: Did they still remember the details of the trial? Ten years later? Twenty years later? Would they remember it for the rest of their lives?

Unanimously, of course, they did remember.

They remembered the photos. And the nights they couldn’t sleep because of those photos.

They remembered how random violence and depravity can be.

I was summoned for jury duty this week, but I was excused because I had to make two round trips to Rolla (at $70 gas per) to deposit and withdraw my son from a robotics camp at Missouri University of Science & Technology.

Which is just as well. I don’t know how impartial I could be as a jurist listening to experts saying that cough syrup made her do it.

I get the sense I would do better on civil trials.

Last week, Pergelator opined:

I’ve been hearing about the clown show in Washington D. C. since forever and I’m thinking maybe we need a different arrangement. Instead of having Congress decide everything, maybe we should hire a manager to actually run the country, the way some city councils hire a manager to run their city. That way the clowns in Congress could concentrate on what’s important to them (which is performing on stage for the public) and the manager could worry about actually running the country. The important part is that Congress would no longer have the power to levy taxes, award contracts or borrow money.

The way the Federal government was supposed to work was that we had a manager type: The Executive, aka the President, who was nominally accountable to the people, executing laws passed by the legislative branch, the Congress. However, it has evolved so that unelected administrators in the Executive branch get to make regulations and enforce them–and they’re barely accountable to the people if the people don’t watch closely the announcements of proposed regulations and raise an outcry when some of the more expansive are introduced.

At the more local level, especially in smaller towns but also smaller cities, where the mayor is part time and the city/county legislatures more parter time, they introduced the City Managers, the chief unelected bureaucrat who ends up serving under various mayors and councils. Who become a power onto themselves, unfortunately.

Here in Missouri, several city managers have recently been ousted by elected officials:

• Branson cleans house after election; Board of Aldermen places city administrator on leave
• Call to fire Independence city manager in police overtime misuse investigation
• I saw another story from a small town east of here in one of the papers I take, but I didn’t clip it and cannot find it online now.

On the flip side, we have a police force threatening resignation when an elected mayor planned to appoint a new police chief: Pierce City, Mo. could have a ‘mass exodus’ of police officers:

”He attempted to relieve the chief of his duties and appoint someone that was not only not qualified, but her moral compass is so messed up that it’s unreal,” Hutson said.

The news story gives no real context to it, and the Springfield media has not followed up to explain who the proposed chief was or what the actual positions this person holds are. This actually follows another local town whose police force resigned en masse last year: Kimberling City Police Department chief, all of his officers announce resignations.

There’s a lot of distrust at all levels of government these days, it seems. And adding unelected authorities to the mix is unlikely to improve trust between citizens and government or even between government entities themselves.

City of Springfield seeks application authorization to end youth homelessness

One cannot make sense of the headline, but if one clicks through and reads the story, it makes sense.

Springfield City Council will meet Tuesday and vote on the approval of an application for a grant to end youth homelessness.

Senior planner Bob Atchley is seeking authorization from the city council to apply for the Youth Homeless Demonstration Program Grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. If awarded, the minimum the city would receive is $1 million.

“This would potentially be huge for youth homelessness in our community,” said Atchley. “It literally will allow us to develop a plan to hopefully end youth homelessness in our community.”

It’s about applying for a one million dollar grant, which some government and governmentish people will spend to create a plan to “end” youth homelessness.

The skeptical amongst us know this will not “end” anything, but certainly it will spend the million dollars. And maybe even yield a paper requiring further ongoing funding to implement. To not “end” anything, because the end would also be the end of the funding.