Very short random gun crankery.

July 28th, 2025

One of the things Mike the Musicologist and I did over the weekend was to make a stop in Canyon Lake and go to the local grocery store.

Not because we were hungry, but because we wanted to try out the ammunition vending machine.

They had rifle, handgun, and shotgun ammunition. We didn’t look at the shotgun ammo. The rifle ammo was: .300 Blackout, .223, and Aguila .22 LR ammo. The handgun ammo was 9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP.

We tried to buy one box of .45 and two boxes of .22 LR. The prices weren’t great, but we were treating this as an experiment.

Unfortunately, there was some sort of problem when I tried to use Apple Pay for the transaction: I think it couldn’t recognize my face due to the position I was in, and the passcode failed as well. And when Apple Pay failed, it left the machine totally locked up. We couldn’t get it to respond to any of the buttons on the screen, or even reset. Poor error handling on the part of the implementation team, I believe.

Sadly, we had to chalk this up as a failed experiment. But I did get some taco-flavored Doritos while I was there. I haven’t seen those around in a while.

Posted in Food, Guns | 2 Comments »

Birthday musical interlude.

July 28th, 2025

Today, my blog is old enough to drive.

At least with a provisional driver’s license in the state of Texas.

It was a busy weekend. I’ll have some more updates later. But how about a musical interlude?

And speaking of Tennessee Ernie Williams, this sounds like one of the upper circles of Hell to me. But I can’t pass up the opportunity to quote the phrase used in the NYT headline, “Tennessee Williams on ice”.

At the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink, home of the North Berkshire Youth Hockey Black Bears, five talented skaters performed Will Davis’s “The Gig,” a diverting if impenetrable riff on a late Williams novel called “Moise and the World of Reason.” As the skaters swirled and swooshed in pretty patterns and garish costumes, never enacting the story literally but suggesting a circle of queer friends and lovers, the audience listened on headphones to selections from the novel while trying to stay warm.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

My blog is broken. Days 5 and 6.

July 25th, 2025

I contacted Bluehost last night to follow up on my ticket.

They claimed they emailed me a status update, which I never received. (Yes, I checked my junk and spam folders.)

They also claimed that I needed to delete some “malware infected” files. The specific ones they cited were:

/home4/sportsg3/public_html/500.php
/home4/sportsg3/public_html/sdclog/500.php

I looked at those files. They looked like standard HTML files displaying a “500 Internal Server Error”. I saw no evidence that they were infected in any way. But Bluehost support refused to proceed until I deleted those files and a “security scan” came back “clean”.

Now that I’ve done that, I’m waiting for an update from Bluehost support. Which I probably won’t get, as they keep claiming to send updates that I don’t get. (They are sending the updates to the admin address with Bluehost, which is also where the chat transcripts (that I am getting) go to.)

In the meantime, I talked to Siteground. They offer everything Bluehost does, and will even do a professional migration of all of my WordPress instances from Bluehost to their hosting. Even better, the first “professional migration” is free, and ones after that are reasonably priced. And their chat rep was pleasant and seemed knowledgeable. (Of course, I don’t know if they were sales or support.)

This may be the way I end up going.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 25, 2025.

July 25th, 2025

Hulk Hogan. THR. NYT. WWE. Legal Insurrection. McThag has a nice obit up which I can’t link to directly: search for “Another One”. IMDB.

Lawrence was trying to convince me yesterday that we should watch “Gremlins 2: The New Batch”. I countered with “Thunder In Paradise”, which appears to be available on DVD as three movies cut together from episodes of the TV show. (See also: “The Master“.)

Lawrence: That’s the one that’s “Airwolf, on a boat, except stupid”?

And “Suburban Commando” is, arguably, a genre film.

Chuck Mangione. THR.

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

My blog is broken. Day 4.

July 23rd, 2025

It has been close to 24 hours since Bluehost “escalated” my case.

I still can’t upload photos, and Bluehost has made no attempt to contact me: I’ve checked my email, including the junk and spam folders.

That doesn’t mean, however, that someone hasn’t been working on my blog.

I discovered when I went to write today’s obit watch that Someone Who Isn’t Me (SWIM) had disabled all my plugins. Including the one that disables the WordPress block editor, and the spam filtering plugin. Which were the only two I had enabled. Yes, disabling plugins is a good diagnostic step, but once you’ve run the diagnostics, shouldn’t you put them back?

And I think I know why I can’t upload images, not even small ones, at least at the moment: someone set the “Maximum upload file size” to “0 B.” Yes, zero bytes. Additionally, there are about five images in my media library that weren’t there before, and are duplicates of images previously uploaded.

I’m going to give Bluehost another 24 hours to fix the problem before I ask for a status update. That’s 48 hours.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 23, 2025.

July 23rd, 2025

Ozzy Osbourne roundup: THR. NYT. ASM826 by way of Borepatch.

In honor of Mr. Osbourne and ASM826’s obit, please feel free to share your favorite “inappropriate public urination” story in the comments below. You can remain monogamous if you’d like: I’m certainly not going to out anybody.

The quartet released its debut album, also called “Black Sabbath,” in 1970, and followed with seven more over the next eight years. The band’s music was largely reviled by critics and snubbed by radio stations, but its albums were consistently certified platinum, and songs like “Paranoid,” “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” became anthems for generations of disaffected youth.

…

Mr. Osbourne had long drunk to excess, but as Black Sabbath became successful he could afford a wider variety of intoxicants, and he enthusiastically pursued all of them. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I Am Ozzy” (2009), “Over the past 40 years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other heavy-duty substances to list.” Throughout his career he frequently announced his sobriety, only to backslide into addiction.

Sarah Morlok Cotton. She was the last survivor of the Morlok quadruplets. And this is one of those sad stories from before my time. I think this is sort of before my mother’s time, even.

They were born in 1930.

Donations poured in almost immediately. The city of Lansing provided the family with a rent-free home. The Massachusetts Carriage Company sent a custom-made baby carriage with four seats. Businessmen opened bank accounts for each child.
“Lansing’s Morlok quadruplets,” The Associated Press wrote, “are the most famous group of babies on the American continent.”
The Morloks charged visitors 25 cents to visit their home and see the babies. Carl Morlok, who ran for constable of Lansing in 1931, used photos of his daughters on his campaign ads with the slogan, “We will appreciate your support.” He won in a landslide.

The Great Depression was ongoing, so their mom turned them into song and dance performers. All four girls were also abused by their father.

He banged the sisters’ heads together when they wouldn’t go to sleep. A germophobe, he forbade them from going to the library because he worried that there were germs on the books. Worst of all, Ms. Farley noted, he sexually abused all of the girls when they were teenagers.

When the girls were in their 20s, they began to show signs of mental illness.

Eventually, a doctor who had been treating the sisters in Michigan referred them to the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland. Intrigued by the connections between the genetic and environmental causes of mental illness, a team of researchers there studied the quadruplets from 1955 to 1958. Each woman had her own psychiatrist, though only Sarah was able to engage in meaningful psychotherapy.

…

Only Sarah recovered enough to live on her own. Ms. Farley attributed that to two factors: She had endured less abuse from her father than her sisters had, and she had benefited from exceptionally good psychotherapy during the study in Maryland.
“She knew quite clearly that she got better at NIMH and her sisters didn’t,” Ms. Farley said in an interview. “And she always had survivor’s guilt about that.”

…

Sarah met George Cotton, an Air Force officer, at Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, D.C. They married in 1961, and for many years she worked as a legal secretary and typist.
Mr. Cotton died in 2023. In addition to their son David, Mrs. Cotton is survived by four grandsons. Another son, William, died in 1994. As for the other Morlok sisters, Wilma died in 2002, Helen in 2003 and Edna in 2015.

Posted in Music, Obits, Urine | 2 Comments »

My blog is broken. Day 3.

July 22nd, 2025

File uploads still do not work. At least, not consistently, and not in a way that I can tolerate.

Sometimes (maybe 30% of the time) I can upload a file, and it appears to work. I can see the file in my media library. I can insert it into a post. But it’s a 50/50 crapshoot whether the file actually displays when I save a draft and preview. Most of the time, I get one of these entertaining error messages:

Screenshot

Screenshot

Screenshot

Yes, these work, but they are very small scren snapshot files. None is over 1 MB in size.

After another half-hour in chat with Bluehost support:

Screenshot

I have to give this support rep props, though: at least he acted on my escalation request the first time. The support rep on Sunday repeatedly refused to escalate.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 22, 2025.

July 22nd, 2025

Sgt. Jake Larson (United States Army – ret.). He was 102.

In January 1942, he was stationed in Northern Ireland as part of the Army V Corps, also known as the Victory Corps. It played critical roles in the D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge.
As an operations sergeant, Mr. Larson assembled the planning books for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy. He ran onto Omaha Beach while German machine gunners sprayed the beach with gunfire.
He told The New York Times in 2019 that he remembered jumping off his landing craft into frigid water up to his neck amid explosions. He hid behind a pile of sand and asked a soldier if he had any dry matches to light a cigarette, as his were all wet.
“I looked again and there was no head under the helmet,” Mr. Larson said. “I thank that guy today. In that instant I had the ability to get up and run.”
He said that he weighed 120 pounds at the time.
“I don’t think the Germans were capable of shooting a toothpick, so I made it to shore,” he said. His unit, though, suffered significant losses.

During the pandemic, his grand daughter set up a TikTok account for him.

Mr. Larson had 1.2 million followers on TikTok on his channel, “Story Time with Papa Jake.” He amassed more than 11 million likes on the page.

…

The first video was posted in June 2020, and about 225 more followed as he quickly gained hundreds of thousands of followers.
Initially, he recounted in detail the preparations for D-Day, the operation itself, and the aftermath. But soon he added a recurring feature in which he opened letters and packages from his followers, and shared their contents in videos.

…

Mr. Larson was the last surviving member of his company.
“I am the last man,” he told The Times, while wearing a pin on his hat with the shield and motto of his military regiment, “To the last man.”

The Luckiest Man in the World: Stories from the life of Papa Jake on Amazon.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner. NYT (archived). IMDB. This is being well covered everywhere, and I have nothing to add. Except maybe: be careful swimming.

Jimmy Hunt, actor. Interesting story: he retired from acting at 14, and died at 85. IMDB.

Edwin Feulner, Heritage Foundation guy.

Tom Troupe, actor. Other credits include “Planet of the Apes” (the TV series), “The F.B.I.”, “Kelly’s Heroes”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight“, season 3, episode 5. He was “Ben Holland”.)

Eileen Fulton, actress. Other credits include “Nero Wolfe” (the 1959 series), “Naked City”, and “Our Private World”.

Posted in 1970s, Heroism, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

My blog is broken. Day 2.

July 21st, 2025

I still can’t upload files.

Bluehost support claimed yesterday, after 2 1/2 hours on the phone, that they had fixed the problem. It worked for a very short time today, but it has gone back to the same errors I was seeing yesterday.

The workaround that they provided also failed with a cryptic “AJAX” error when I tried using it.

Posted in Admin | 2 Comments »

My blog is broken.

July 20th, 2025

And Bluehost is as useless as teats on a boar hog, as we like to say here in Texas.

Edited to add: according to Bluehost, they have no way to transfer calls internally.

Edited to add 2: I am super, super unhappy with Bluehost and their support right now. As much of a pain as it is likely to be, I am giving serious and urgent thought to exporting everything and finding new hosting.

Edited to add 3: Among other responses from support, they can’t update my PHP instance because “my content is outdated”. (Do they mean my WordPress version? It’s at 6.8.2. Which I resent because they forced this upgrade on me. I had been avoiding upgrades, even though it is a security issue, because I didn’t want to use the farking WordPress block editor, which I hate with the fire of a thousand suns. So when they forced the upgrade on me, first thing I did was install a plugin to disable the block editor.)

Edited to add 4: the specific problem is that I can’t upload normal JPEG files, the largest of which is about 5.4 MB. WordPress just hangs during the upload process, or returns an error saying the server can’t handle a file of that size. Hasn’t been a problem in the past. Two and half hours in chat with a Bluehost support person, and no resolution. Their attitude is that for “large” files, I should:

  • Log into my control panel.
  • Upload the files using the “file manager”.
  • Go back to WordPress.
  • Manually sync my media library with the files I just uploaded.

Instead of, you know, pressing the “add media” button in WordPress, selecting the file I want to upload, and letting WordPress do the work.

Screenshot

This, on the other hand, uploaded just fine.

Posted in Admin, Rage | 2 Comments »

Bagatelle (#138)

July 19th, 2025

“Justified” is full of timeless wisdom about how one should lead their life.

One of the best examples of this is Raylan’s Rule:

Raylan Givens: Any problem, that’s someone else’s fault. You ever hear of the saying, “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole”?

Another good example of this:

Art Mullen: I got a call this morning from AUSA David Vasquez. Wants to talk to you about you shooting Boyd Crowder.
Raylan Givens: What’s there to talk about? He pulled first. There was a witness.
Art Mullen: But you see, ten days ago you shot a man in Miami. Put it like this: you were in the first grade; bit a kid every week? They’d start to think of you as a biter.

“They’d start to think of you as a biter.” What brings this to mind?

A summer associate at white-shoe firm Sidley Austin began biting colleagues and roaring at them on her first day — and by the time she was canned, her body count had reached double digits, insiders told the legal news site Above the Law.
The bites were not “in an aggressive, ‘we’re beefing’ way” – but rather, “a faux-quirky manic pixie dream girl crossed with the Donner party vibe,” the outlet reported.
“Though I’ve seen pics of the results post-Biglaw Biter, and ‘nibble’ is probably too tame a word,” the article’s author noted.

…

A jaw-dropping account of the chomping spree posted to X said the girl sank her teeth into 10 colleagues, including other summer interns, associate lawyers and even an HR rep at the firm’s Seventh Avenue offices.

…

The firm declined to comment. But an insider told The Post the intern bit only five employees and that exaggerations were now flooding the internet.

Posted in Bagatelle, Law, TV | 2 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#149 in a series)

July 18th, 2025

In April of last year, the Detroit Lakes (Minnesota) Police Department responded to a report of a break-in. When they responded, they found a woman in the basement of a home, “dressed in black and carrying a flashlight covered with a sock”.

The woman was State Senator Nicole Mitchell. The home was her stepmother’s.

On Friday, a jury in northern Minnesota convicted Ms. Mitchell of burglary and possession of burglary or theft tools, felonies that can carry prison sentences.

Ms. Mitchell told the police…

…she had entered the house to collect sentimental items, including one of her late father’s flannel shirts. “I have never done anything like this,” she said during the arrest, body camera footage showed.

…

After the arrest, Ms. Mitchell issued a statement denying that she had stolen anything. She said then that she entered the house to check on a family member suffering from “Alzheimer’s and associated paranoia.” During the trial, she and her lawyers insisted she was acting out of concern for her ailing relative.

…

On the witness stand this week, the stepmother described being awakened by someone in her home and calling the police. She acknowledged having Alzheimer’s and at times gave testimony that seemed to contradict body camera footage.
Ms. Mitchell testified in her own defense for several hours on Thursday. She said she had not been at the house to get her father’s belongings, as she initially told police officers, but instead to check on her stepmother’s well-being.

I’m actually slightly sympathetic to Ms. Mitchell and her problems caring for an aging relative with Alzheimer’s. But it sounds like she told one story to the responding officers (who were wearing body cameras) and a different story at trial. That never looks good to the jury. And she could have called the police for a welfare check, too, if she was concerned.

The burglary charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison upon conviction, and the burglary tools charge carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison.

There’s a lot of discussion in the NYT coverage of what this means for Al Franken the Minnesota senate. The Democratic party (to which Ms. Mitchell belongs, and this is actually noted in the second paragrpah) holds a one-seat majority in the Senate.

Already this year, special elections have been held to replace a Democratic senator who died and a Republican senator who resigned after being accused of arranging to meet with an underage prostitute. Another special election filled a House seat after a judge determined that the Democrat who won the regular election did not meet residency requirements. Then last month, State Representative Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, was assassinated and State Senator John A. Hoffman, a Democrat, was shot and wounded in what the authorities described as targeted political violence.
If Ms. Mitchell leaves office, the Senate would be evenly divided until Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, calls a special election for voters to choose a replacement, which could happen before lawmakers return to the Capitol in 2026.

More coverage from the Star-Tribune:

[Becker County Attorney Brian] McDonald said she never placed a welfare call. Instead she drove 220 miles in the middle of the night, dressed in all black and packed flashlights, latex gloves and a small pry crowbar device used to break into the basement window.
“Who packs a freaking prybar just in case?” McDonald said to the jury.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

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