Ironhold

One of the more traditional Christmas songs I play each year.

People often have significant differences in what they mean by "disrespect". At the extreme end, this can even include "I'm right, and anyone who disagrees is being petulant".

In my annual Halloween safety column, I recount an incident that happened to one of my brothers. He was at a convenience store buying gas. He also picked up a bag of off-brand gummi candy while he was in there. There were wooden splinters in the gummi candy. Yes, I was there when he opened up the bag. The only thing he can figure is that something broke apart at the factory, the splinters made it inside, and quality control missed it.

In the case of the poisoned Halloween candy, however, there is an actual origin: a man who was deep in debt attempting to murder his children for their life insurance policies. The story was continually circulated without vital context, and it exploded from there.

A few years ago, the folks at controversial internet forum 4-Chan began to question whether certain "progressive" news outlets were actually doing any sort of independent investigation into certain topics or if they were just taking initial reports at face value. To this end, one user came up with a fictitious story about the OK symbol being adopted as a "white power" gesture and started farming it out in various forms to different "progressive" outlets. A group known as The Root took the bait and ran the story, using this 4-Chan user as their primary source. It didn't take long for 4-Chan to blow the whistle and reveal what had happened, but by then it was too late as many "progressive" internet forums had already taken the initial The Root article at face value and were spreading the word accordingly. Once word started getting around that the OK symbol was now supposedly racist, actual white supremacist groups started using it. For obvious reasons, only very biased and uninformed people now use The Root as a source.

Pretty much. He never should have been there in the first place, and he likely didn't even know any of the people who came after him until they came after him, so he did what little he thought he could to defend himself.

I've seen it happen before to where people invite members of the church to "debate", assume that they'll just crush us by spamming us with tired old counter-cult materials they got in a bookstore somewhere and outdated pop culture stereotypes. When they realize that no, we actually know what we're talking about and can even counter their arguments, they'll start freaking out. This wasn't the plan, we're not cooperating, and they have no idea what to do next. Rather than face the reality that they didn't know what they were doing, it's just easier for them to shut the door on us and lock us out so that they can maintain the sanctity of their echo chambers, all the while running damage control to ensure that nobody tries to follow us out. It's not just an issue with religion, either. You'll see it in any discipline, field, or even social media forum where someone who was so utterly self-confident in their supposed superiority cannot compete in the Marketplace of Ideas and throws an absolute fit because of it. I'm dealing with this a lot right now as an entertainment writer, with the "elite" in many forms of entertainment (such as movies and comic books) losing their minds because the general public is starting to reject the increasingly polarized and poorly-written material so many companies are putting out and the "elites" can't understand why anyone would do that. These elites feel that they know what's best for the public and what the public should be consuming, so whenever their offerings fail and content from outside of the mainstream (or that otherwise goes against the elites) succeeds they panic and demand that the rules be changed to favor them while denigrating anyone who doesn't join the bandwagon. Right now, for example, "Ghostbusters: Afterlife" is on track to absolutely annihilate the 2016 reboot in terms of box office take. The film was a love letter to the fandom while also setting the stage for a new generation of characters to come in, and people are responding by buying ticket after ticket; my local theater actually has three of its eight screens showing it right now. But because the film repudiates the 2016 movie in every possible fashion, the 2016 film's Hollywood backers are furious and unleashing pure venom on anyone who likes the new movie.

You can't sell guns on E-Bay anymore. Not even toy guns. I have some vintage cap guns (we're talking 1950s) I was looking to unload, but the week after they came into my possession E-Bay changed the rules in that regards. I don't know of anyone locally who will give me a fair deal on them.

His dad lives in Kenosha and he has other relatives who live there, so he really *did* think he was protecting everything.

I generally work most, if not all, week long on Thanksgiving week because of local events and how the local newspaper works. That's generally a full shift on Monday nights, plus partial shifts on Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday. This is on top of the movie each Friday for review. That leaves me perhaps Tuesday and Saturday without issue, but this year I have a dental appointment on Tuesday. Family time? What family time?

If I was to go back and finish getting my certification as a forklift operator I could probably make 5x my salary as I am right now with the newspaper. The problem is that the newspaper I'm with is so short-handed that they literally could not function without me, and things are so lean we can't afford to hire anyone else even if they could find someone willing to do everything I do.

I have a heart condition to begin with, and this has led to high blood pressure. I got the Moderna shot before mainstream outlets like the AP confirmed that Moderna had heart inflammation as a side effect. I've noted before that the first shot left me laid up longer and harder than a mystery illness I had earlier in the year that could have been Covid, and that the second shot, combined with manual labor that day, left me so bad I should have gone to the hospital. As you can imagine, I'm more than a little scared now, and even my mom, who was super hard core on everyone getting vaccinated, has apologized for pushing me when I was initially so hesitant.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-business-denmark-public-health-health-453163d8f93618fde90c06d3474921a0 If you get the Moderna shot, go right straight to the emergency room. Five countries in Europe have restricted the use of the Moderna vaccine because of an incidence rate of heart inflammation in minors. Anyone under 30 is not to get the vaccine at all, while anyone between 30 and 60 is only to get the vaccine if no other vaccines are available. Basically folks, Moderna is potentially more dangerous to your kids than Covid itself.

A very large part of our current problems is the dire shortage of skilled trades workers. For generations now, the mentality in the United States has been "college is for winners, trade school is for losers". There was a stigma attached to becoming a skilled trades worker, so much so that even in high schools kids were pushed towards college even when it should have been obvious that they would have been better suited in one of the skilled trades. As a result, these kids either failed out of higher education or didn't have the desire to go, hindering their entire lives. A very large part of why those ships are all stuck waiting to get into ports is because there aren't enough workers to handle them all once they dock. There aren't enough dock workers, crane operators, forklift operators, and others to actually offload those ships once they get to port. There aren't enough truck drivers, pilots, and train engineers to take the offloaded product and get them to where they need to go. There aren't enough mechanics and technicians to maintain those forklifts, trucks, trains, planes, cranes, and so on. Et cetra. Construction workers, plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians, pest control experts, and others we count on to actually make society function are all in short supply, such that many of them can actually get more money as apprentices and newly-licensed beginners than many people with college degrees can expect to make just after graduation. And yet, the stigma persists.

Sadly, the "woke" crowd has come to realize that the only way for their cause to prevail is if they poison the minds of the upcoming generations, as anyone with sense and logic can blow gaping holes in their arguments with often token amounts of research. Thus, we're going to see books making "heroes" out of Che Guevara, Dr. Fauci, and others who history is rightly recording as villains.

Almost no basements in my part of Texas either, but we find ways to manage. It's all about making the most of what storage you do have. For example, our house has a small cabinet to the right of the sink. Other houses with our floor plan have a dishwasher in that spot, but since we wash our dishes by hand we have that little spot for more storage.

The Station fire was a *very* complicated situation. 1. The foam used for sound insulation was *not* rated for fire safety and so never should have been used for that purpose. 2. One of the doors to the outside opened inward, a violation of fire codes 3. The manager failed to indicate that pyrotechnics would be used during the show, and so this prevented the usual safety checks that would have taken place. The pyro used was set up to shoot flames to a height far above what the building's ceiling was. Thus, the ceiling and the foam - which was known to be flammable - instantly combusted. As a result, the band's manager and one of the two owners went to jail for the incident.

She. The armorer is a woman. There is actually a lot of heat going right now because of this, with people asking if she was hired because she was a woman.

Just because you need a camera to go looking somewhere doesn't mean that the camera itself has to be manned. There are remote cameras and such that can be set up.

During the so-called "Golden Age" of comic books in the United States, "true crime" titles were quite popular with adult readers. These titles told the story of various criminals whose illegal actions brought them temporary luxury, only to have everything - perhaps even their lives - taken away from them as the ultimate consequence of their actions. The overall message was "Crime may bring you comfort in the short term, but in the long term it's going to be even worse for you than what you already have right now." Sadly, due to the moral backlash caused by the publication of the work "Seduction of the Innocent", these true crime titles largely ceased to exist, the result of the industry accountability body known as the Comics Code Authority refusing to certify any such book. Why? In the eyes of the CCA officials, these books glorified crime by showing *that* the criminals gained luxury from their crimes, and that even though the criminals all met terrible fats this depiction was all that mattered.

Before the pandemic, regional grocery chain H-E-B had a deal in place with book publisher Bendon wherein Bendon would supply them with hardback kids' picture books. As part of it, they would have a thing to where at least one coupon deal each week would net you one of these books for free. The idea was that since these were items families were likely purchasing anyway, it would put more books in the hands of children who likely needed it. The pandemic forced them to stop doing these offers for about a year and a half because they didn't have a steady supply of books, but back around September they started it up again for the program's 10th anniversary. This is one picture I took showing a recent coupon offer, where if you bought a "giant" sized box of kid-friendly cereal you'd get a free carton of milk and a free book.

Latest reports are that the armorer and a few other people were using some of the prop guns - likely including the one Baldwin had - to go target-shooting with live ammunition. The assistant director has also admitted that he didn't stop to check the entire cylinder, and made his "cold" declaration just off of what he could see.

Believe it or not, comic books are often quite popular for use in teaching kids to read.

As an entertainment writer IRL, I've been doing what I can to follow this story. It's... a mess. The assistant director, basically the #2 guy on set, has been accused of engaging in dangerous practices before, forcing cast and crew to keep working even after situations became openly dangerous. This includes, allegedly, one incident where an actor was injured and another incident where a member of the production team nearly went into a diabetic coma. The armorer responsible for handling the weapons on-set has apparently not been adhering to safety standards either, and it's now being alleged that at least one gun for the set was taken off-set for use in target shooting. The film shoot itself apparently racked up *six* citations for safety, with the citations being for things so serious that even one individual citation would normally lead to a project being shut down. Apparently, whatever took place happened not just well after filming had finished, but after several members of the production crew had walked out in protest due to the unsafe working conditions. The assistant director went onto the set for the scene, declared the gun in question to be "cold", and allowed Baldwin to take it. Baldwin, in turn, presumed that the declaration was correct and did not inspect the weapon himself. Reports vary as to whether or not Baldwin was rehearsing a scene or going off on a political rant, but the gist of it is that at the end of it he pointed the gun at the two members of the production crew and taunted them, possibly attempting to joke with them. That's when the gun went off. Cue the meme showing a shoebill in the rain angrily glaring at the camera person, with captions about how this is how Brandon Lee is presently reacting from the other side. It is presently unknown if the weapon in question had live ammunition, likely the result of it having been used off-set, or if the blank knocked loose some sort of blockage in the barrel (which blanks can do, as they do have a small paper payload and so have tremendous force at point-blank range, enough to mortally injure). Either way, a competent armorer should have inspected every last weapon, including this one, to make sure the barrels were clean and the guns themselves loaded with the required munitions - in this case blanks - before they were on-set. Baldwin's defenders are coming up with every excuse they can think of to try and protect him, even going so far as to try and launch a conspiracy as to whether or not someone changed out the ammunition at the last minute to humiliate him. At the very least, though, Baldwin failed to personally check over the weapon and pointed it at people he ostensibly never meant to hurt. Those are such basic violations of firearm safety that if this had happened here in Texas his lawyers would already be talking to prosecutors.

Tossing this out for a discussion. Speaking as an entertainment writer, I can pretty well say that we're one of the few demographic groups that Hollywood (et al) feels comfortable in mocking and making fun of. So if we want positive representation that isn't a fluke, we'll need to start doing it ourselves. In what was would everyone here represent the faith in a positive fashion if they were working on media intended to be mainstream?