Riley on the treadmill

Until we get Riley fitted for her Invisible Fence collar (next week?) she goes out on a leash which means she can’t really run around to burn off her puppy energy. Barb has been training her to walk on the treadmill to get some exercise. She’s getting the hang of it but I’m not seeing puppy joy on her face.

Grapple Loader

We’ve had a bunch of brush piles on our property for the last five years. Home to many birds and critters no doubt. But a couple close to the house had become eye sores so I had the boys from Korte Tree Care come and adios them.

More adventurous types would burn these but the thought of setting our woods on fire is too much for me.

Mississippi Burning: Gene Hackman grabs KKK man’s testicles

I love the scene in Mississippi Burning where Gene Hackman grabs KKK man Michael Rooker’s testicles.

It came to mind while watching Get Shorty in which John Travolta’s character grabs James James Gandolfini’s character by the balls and tosses him down a flight of steps. I should compile a list of such scenes, right? Too late. Been a long time since I came up with an idea for a “best of” that hadn’t been done.

“How many more people have to die?”

What a closed rural hospital tells us about US healthcare


When I was growing up in Kennett, Missouri, in the ’50s and ’60s, the Dunklin County Memorial Hospital was… an institution. That’s where I had my tonsils removed and that’s where everybody went if you needed to be in the hospital. If you needed some kind of special treatment or care you probably went to one of the hospitals in Memphis, 100 miles away. The hospital closed last year, pushing the little town that much closer to… I’m not sure what.

“We’re having probably three to five more deaths a month without having the hospital here,” he said. “I had a 35-year-old patient who started having chest pain. He needed to get to an emergency room but died on the way to the hospital. There are multiple deaths due to not having emergency services, mostly from heart attacks and accidents. There’s nowhere to stabilise them. If they’re having a heart attack, they’re dying before they get to the hospital. Plus the infant mortality rate has increased since the hospital closed.”

It’s happening all over rural America. This article tells the story. As does RP.

UPDATE (5/15/20): Company announces plans to re-open hospital in Missouri’s poorest region. “Nine of the state’s ten poorest counties are in southeast Missouri, and the Bootheel is the state’s poorest region.”

The smartphone is our era’s cigarette

Ross Barkan writing in The Guardian:

“(The 2010s were) dominated, from start to finish, by a single piece of technology that has obliterated the promise of the internet and corrupted human interaction. The smartphone is to the 2010s what cigarettes were to much of the twentieth century, a ubiquitous and ruinous marker of the zeitgeist.”

“In the late 2000s, we allowed a few corporations to persuade us that this advanced, alien technology – assembled via de facto slave labor in Asia – was essential to human existence. We readily bought in, condensing our lives behind the sleek glass. The scroll hooked us like a drug, triggering the exact right loci in our brains; suddenly, we could never be bored again, doped by endless Facebook and Instagram feeds, retreating from unnecessary conversation or thought into an infinity of trivia. The internet never left us.”