Rachel Ray With Fins

WSIL-3:  Crisis In Cairo

That could be any time.

KSDK:  Police: Shoe store robbed, suspect arrested

Sources describe him as a “lost sole.”

WND:  Driver’s licenses let applicants pick gender

I thought that was taken care of at the moment of conception.

AP/Obama:  Obama readies road map for new bailout spending

Remember when you had to unfold a map so big that there wasn’t enough room in your car?  That’s what Obama’s road map is going to be like.

AP/Obama:  Analysis: Team Obama preoccupied with Bush

The last Democrat in the White House was also preoccupied with bush.

USNAWR:  Must You Diet on Super Bowl Sunday?

You won’t feel like eating if your team loses.  Beentheredonethat.

SPACE.com:  Space Station Crew Backs Steelers in Super Bowl

At the time they went up to the Space Station, there weren’t any Arizona Cardinals fans to be found, even in Arizona.

Time:  New Playground Architecture: Bye, Jungle Gym

Hello, Rainforest Gym.

McClathcy:  GOP picks its first black chairman, but will change follow?

Not if Michael Steele has his way, the GOP will lose as usual.

Reuters:  Earth-hunter telescope prepared for launch

It won’t be hard, just have the telescope turn backwards.  Voila, Earth.

Reuters:  Dolphins are capable sea chefs, scientists say

Aquariums are already busy giving new names to their Dolphins like Gordon Ramsay and Rachel Ray.

MacWorld:  ‘Duck Hunt’ iPhone game pulled at Nintendo’s request

Good, I hate it when a dog laughs at me.

Reuters:  Rapper DMX sentenced to 90 days in jail

Harrumph!!! Look at the jurisdiction.  He better get used to pink underwear and tents.

Judges to Bryce: Lump It

Eight Circus sides with the School.  Bob Herman will appeal to SCOTUS.

The P-D outlines the school’s case (but very little of Archambo’s case), relaying several racial incidents at Farmington High School.

In the last several decades, because so many jobs have been drained out of small town Missouri because of free trade, powerful outstate legislators (Kevin Engler, a Farmingtonian, now runs the Senate) have feted prison construction and placement in these towns, in order to create jobs for the locals.  Apparently, the prison near Farmington is a rather big one.

The flip side of the coin, especially with prisons near towns that aren’t too far from major cities, like Farmington vis-a-vis St. Louis, is that many black men from St. Louis are sent to Farmington to serve their sentences, and invariably, some members of their family move into the town to be close to their incarcerated loved one.  This has created something of a semi-permanent but transient black population in Farmington, and thus a sizable black minority in the student body at the high school.

Unfortunately, rural public schools are just as liberal as the urban ones, so of course the black students’ feelings will be the first ones taken into consideration.  Our diversity is our strength, of course; screw the kind of people that have lived in Farmington for several generations.

On the Other Hand…

You can’t be too hard on a guy who steals explosives from the police in anticipation of the 2012 end of the world according to the Mayan calendar.  After all, he did seem to be sensitive to the culture of one of the ancient indigenous civilizations of North America.  And we are told that we need their descendants here to do the jobs that we won’t do, and for more diversity.

The Mirror Opposite of Vincent Richardson

In the mirror opposite end of the state.

Two Murphysboro men are now accused of using Carbondale P.D. radios and guns to knock back a bank in Carbondale last November.  Evidently, they planned the scheme starting in the summer, and it got pretty sophisticated with the number of diversionary tactics they employed.In the mirror opposite end of the state.

Odd Birds

There was an AP article today about the problem that commercial airplanes have with birds, in the aftermath of the Miracle on the Hudson several weeks ago.

I’m beginning to wonder — Could it be the reason why major airports don’t have any effective bird mitigation is because of either the whining of individual do-gooder libs and/or the same on the part of the animal rights crowd?

Just wondering.

Thanks For Your Concern

Several people have e-mailed me and asked if I was affected by the ice storm that battered this part of the country.

How close was I to regions that had power outages?  As close as the (still unshaven as of this afternoon) hair on my chiney chin chin.  The Murphysboro-Carbondale-Marion belt had mostly snow and some ice, but just a few paces south and there was enough ice to cause outages.  Further south, on an east-west line that runs from about Paducah to Anna to Sikeston to Dexter to Poplar Bluff — that area was really hit hard.  At the worst, almost everyone in that area lost power.  Nearly all of those in Southern Illinois that lost power has got it back, but at the moment, southeast Missouri including the Bootheel is still in the dark and cold.  Paducah isn’t much better off.

It did affect me in that my work was closed both Tuesday and Wednesday.

The same storm dumped as much as almost 10 inches of snow in certain points around St. Louis.