Category: News

…or someone doesn’t use Oxford commas in headlines.

I know which one I think it is.

At the top of the KY3 home page today:

This weekend on KY3, and hence further down the home page:

Truly, they have a dizzying intellect!

Also, it’s possible the Web/social media team is different from the actual news team.

Amid ‘summer surge’ of new COVID variant — should we be wearing masks?

I’ve only seen a couple of headlines on the new Covid strain and did not click through because I’m not a particular Covidophile, but apparently someone has gotten the word out–perhaps on cable news or something–because both of the times I’ve been to Sam’s Club or the grocery store this week, I’ve seen people wearing masks again.

Not many, but someone has heard the huntsman’s horn and is again obeying.

Best-selling crime novelist Lee Goldberg shares footage of terrifying real-life raid on $2.8M home: ‘My fiction is coming true’

It doesn’t pay to be rich in California these days, either.

In the olden days, we used to say you’d “flipped it” when you scored enough points on a video game to overrun its maximum score and start over at 0. I remember spending more than one afternoon playing Asteroids on an Atari 2600 to accomplish this feat. Time was slower in the 1980s, or the days were longer, but playing a repetitive game for hours just to see the score restart as though you’d just started playing–try to explain that to a young person today.

It looks like television meteorologists have done something similar.

The temperatures–no, sorry, the invented temperatures of the “heat index”–will be so hot this weekend that they have gone to the opposite side of the rainbow, from the red to the violet, where they will presumably at 120 degrees or so move into the blue like it was cold.

Although to be honest, it has not gotten to 120 degrees that I recall. Over 110 a time or two. But never all the way back to blue.

Where is Samuel L. Jackson when you need him?

Passengers traveling with Iraqi Airways from Dubai to Baghdad were left roaring mad after their flight was delayed because of a bear that had broken out of its crate in the cargo hold.

Wait, no: The film is Cocaine Bears on a Plane.

It cannot miss.

How four Wisconsin women made Forbes’ list of the richest self-made women in America:

Four Wisconsin businesswomen were named to Forbes’ 2023 list of the 100 richest self-made women in America, alongside international superstars like Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian and Beyoncé.

Real businesswomen compared to pop tarts. Businesses who build/sell things are just like celebrities who…. well, I guess two of the three sing.

As I saw the headline, I tried to guess the companies the women founded/run, and I only got two of four (ABC Supply and Epic Systems). I had forgotten that ULine was based in Wisconsin and is credited to self-making its current owner (both the woman running Uline founded the business with their husbands, so self-made diminishes the contributions of their husbands). I also guessed Trek bikes would be on the list, but I guess not.

Still, to compare people doing real work with mere entertainers diminishes them.

Electric Utility Peak Warnings issued for customers across Southwest, Mo.:

Multiple utilities across southwest Missouri issued electric utility peak warnings due to the heat.

No, the problems stem from malinformed Missouri voters who passed a constitutional amendment, what, fifteen years ago that mandates power companies produce 8% of their power from “renewable” sources and federal clean air regulations that forces power companies to shut down functioning power plants.

In the conspiracy lobe of my brain, I do wonder if they want to curtail your energy use and minimize your air conditioning to convince you that global warming is real and increasing.

World has hottest day ever recorded by humans

That’s the headline on a slug that the Springfield Business Journal has for a link to a Quartz article about how some group of prognosticators has massaged data to indicate that CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL!!!! The Springfield Business Journal headline would seem to indicate something else has measured the temperatures on Earth, but the Quartz article makes no such claims, nor does it offer perspective on different climates over the aeons.

But the fact remains that it relies on data starting in 1880ish, and the 140 years of data collected with varied instruments in varied locations still only accounts for a very small percentage of human history and an immeasurably small percentage of the planet’s existence.

But Trust the Scientismists.

Why there’s a fake coyote on duty at Nathanael Greene Park in Springfield, Mo.:

Park administrators recently placed a coyote decoy on the peninsula in Lake Drummond. That’s the site of a new mosaic sundial.

They hope the decoy will keep Canada Geese from leaving droppings behind that could stain the newly poured concrete. Park workers say they weighed several factors when choosing which coyote to deploy.

* * * *

Park administrators ask you to do your part to keep the area free of geese by leaving the decoy alone.

#HasTheCoyoteBeenStolenYet?

In a post on the likelihood of a hot civil war, Animal says:

A second civil war would be catastrophic. It would be fought not on distant fields, not by massive armies maneuvering against each other in open country. It will be fought in the streets, in the towns, amongst us in ways no other war has touched us since the Revolution, and if similar conflicts are any indication – see not only Bosnia but also the Spanish Civil War – it will result in hatreds that will last generations.

As I have mentioned before, here in the Ozarks, it was house-to-house and family-to-family raiding during the Late Unpleasantness. And some of the locals still have a kind of respect for Quintrill’s Raiders.

So I have imagination enough to know how that might go.

(Yes, I do read the rule 5 posts for the articles.)

Unsurprisingly, the answer the journalist presents is a mixture of racism and modern loneliness of immigrants.

However, gentle reader, one with historical perspective might point out that Aryans where proto-Persian/Indians from way, way back in history who conquered India and placed themselves, with their lighter skin tones, at the top of the heap and established what would become the caste system in India. As the young man in question has a lighter complexion and immigrated to the United States with his family, he might have been of those upper classes in India who might have looked down on other Indians. I’m not going to actually ascribe motives to him (or posit that he might be a fed like all the cool kids are).

But I am bogged down in the India book in The Story of Civilization (the Our Oriental Heritage volume), and this history is fresh in my mind.

Never is the question “How do other nations/ethnographies treat those of other nations/races/ethnographies?” Because that answer would be worse than the West and especially Americans do.

Becky, the Queen of Carpet and beloved icon of St. Louis advertising, dies at 67

I just posted about her yesterday.

Although the article says she actually died Sunday, which might have prompted the clickbait list which I linked to yesterday.

Although for some reason, I thought she’d already died. Most of them on the clickbait list already have.

New BMW lets you change lanes with your eyes

The Springfield Daily Citizen proffered a podcast I did listen to because I already know the answer.

“Book Bans” today just means not putting sexual material in the elementary school library. You want to get around it? Order it on Amazon.

When a community objects to government subsidy and encouragement of objectionable material, that’s not a ban. Just because something is not provided by the government does not mean it’s banned. Unless one is actively arguing for “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

I am tired of how some political actors stretch definitions to conflate something objectionable with something wrong.

Springfield shelters overrun with kittens

We brought in a pair of black cats last year, so we’re topped up.

But in the last couple of days, we’ve seen some new faces, including a large black cat with white feet and, this very morning, a pair of very young tabbies.

It seems cyclical at Nogglestead. We see a lot of tabbies wandering around, and then we see a bunch of Jigsaw-spawn running around, and then we see a bunch of black cats running around, and I guess we might be back to tabbies somehow.

I guess it all depends upon the lifespans of their various mothers in the wild.