What in the wide world of sports, no Yahoo Finance on Roku Live TV as of this morning?

This is my preferred background noise. The channel is gone, and there’s no explanation. Further evidence of a bleak you will have nothing future.

Here’s a thing: I think business news keeps you up to speed moreso than anything else. When I had YouTube TV I kind of became addicted to CNBC. Which did some nice news pieces. But YouTube TV was a hundred a month, and actually, CNBC gave some bad advice / was a bad hype machine what with Jim Cramer and that dipshit crypto guy, can’t remember his name. And Shark Tank is stupid.

You use the freebie Roku Live TV app, these are all free channels. It had Yahoo Finance as a business channel. Much more temperamentally / editorially placid.

Now it’s gone, and there’s no explanation to be websearched.

I’m all in for all the MAGA misanthropes disqualifying themselves for DJT’s VP

And leaving him with Ron DeSantis. Who’s the guy DJT should take but won’t because his thing is intemperate MAGA yes men.

Ya know, Ron DeSantis is…

• Not MAGA, not really
• An adult. You want to say he’s an asshole? He might be. But he’s an adult.
• Would probably take the job (to run)
• Probably has more of Mike Pence’s good qualities that made Pence say nah to Jan 6
• Is smart, would see to overlay and execute an ideological vision such that DJT and repubs would win (and ya know, its 50/50. Biden could very easily win).

Live shot of my untrainable lab / heeler who’s made it to almost age 12 here without us taking her out to a gravel pit. In fairness to us, I don’t think a dog with heeler brain can be trained to do much except herd other critters and scan the horizon for interlopers. That’s what they do really. They are watch dogs, protecting their pack. That’s more their attribute than ‘herding’. So we’ve had this dog, and she’s not really all that trainable, not a terribly good obeyer (she’s passable). She’s probably had some effect as a watch dog though.

Alright, Kristi Noem….

I have squirrels in my yard, gray and red, and they fill the engine bays of my cars with black walnuts and then little nests. I live in an exurban neighborhood and the houses are not far apart, but I have an airgun and I have the skill to wipe all these little fuckers out without my neighbors being wise to it, such that some of them would care. And I should do this, I would almost say, as the solution to my problem.

But I don’t. Because I respect animals more than that.

Now it’s fair, probably, for farmers / ranchers to be more practical and less sentimental about animals to the point you will kill them for convenience. I can see it. And then It’s fair to the point that it’s not not necessarily ‘wrong’ for her to have killed that young healthy dog. You call that ‘putting down’ an animal, and it happens for a lot of reasons. People are having a reaction because it’s a dog, no doubt. But if she’s what amounts to a pro dog person and she doesn’t want to maintain the dog or sell it to the public, can a layman question that with any standing? Not really.

You ain’t truth bombing the world with cosmic righty wisdom though bitch. Animal killing is minimally a thing that should be discrete.

Torbole

My grandmother’s brother Richard “Dick” Rogers was killed 4/29/45 at the Battle of Torbole in Italy. Everything I know about Dick Rogers:

I’ve written about this before here and there, in the blog. One sees that date… it’s so close to VE Day (which happened days after), that you could think there shouldn’t have been all that much fierce fighting going on, and that getting killed days before the end then has got to be bad luck that’s ironically or cosmically bad. Well no, that’d not be actually true though. I think I understand now the cosmic reality is whatever bad luck that luck is isn’t any badder than anything else that might get you killed in war. It’s all qualitatively the same kind of chaos that comes out of warmaking. That kind of what you think is ironic timing means nothing. When it’s on, it’s on. You’re in harm’s way if you are there in the theatre.

The war was still on in northern Italy. I take it to understand who was left for Germany there were Wehrmacht and SS, such that they’d been put in Italy to firm up Mussolini’s army in 1943. With Mussolini’s army having surrendered in 1944, they were now isolated and getting overwhelmed like all other German troops. But they were more formidable than some of the shakier under and over age conscripts pressed into service at the end on the eastern and some of the western front.

These guys were retreating from US Army advance, and trying to make an escape across the border to Austria rather than be taken POW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_1945_offensive_in_Italy

Far as I can tell, Battle of Torbole might have been the last battle the US Army fought in Europe. Torbole is just a little town at the north end of Lake Garda. This is the kind of place now though, that if George Clooney hadn’t managed to get a place on Lake Como, Lake Garda would have sufficed. But then it was merely a place the Germans were passing through and trying to defend themselves at as they tried to get on a clear road to Innsbruck.

Torbole was on the lakeshore, and quite lower than the hills surrounding it. All of Italy was hilly or mountainous, and the war there was a 10th Mountain Division effort. Dick was in the 10th Mountain Division, and a 2nd Lt.

Dick was born 1920, the first of my great grandparents 5 kids. Dick 1920, Dorothy 1922. Dorothy is my maternal grandmother. Adelaide 1923, Howard 1925. Howard was in the Battle of the Bulge, and he came home, died 1988. Gerry born 1934, he was in Korea. I knew Gerry all my life, nice man.

This was the family of Alfred Rogers and Helen Rogers nee Paul. This family was raised in Ambrose Paul’s house at 922 Armstrong in St. Paul, and Ambrose was alive until 1938. Dick and Howard knew him well, and I’m sure for somewhat a larger than life presence. Ambrose came to the US from alpine southern Germany in 1884, and had been a plains Army cavalry sergeant starting then for ten years. He’d been present at Sitting Bulls arrest. In St. Paul after, he built his house, had his own family, and worked at the Omaha railroad car shops on Randolph. In the 20’s, he bootlegged a little or more. In the 30’s, he was retired and sent Dick and Howard to Cretin. To say, a vigorous man’s life here in the US as an immigrant.

Ambrose died 1938, Dick graduated Cretin in 1938. When the war came Dick enlisted and got rejected for bad hearing. Dick couldn’t accept that I’m sure as a matter of pride and doing what he felt he should be doing at that moment in the nation. His friends were going into the military. So he enlisted in the Canadian Army and got accepted. Then somehow it was worked out that he’d be in the US Army, and he ended up in the 10th Mountain Division. He didn’t go to college, but I suppose it would have been because of Cretin ROTC that he was made a 2nd LT.

In reading the deets of this mil hist I take it there’s a certain amount of lore to having started with the 10th at training in the Rockies in 1942 and then having done the Aleutian campaign and then gone to Italy. Dick didn’t get in that early. He entered theater as a replacement. He went to 86th Infantry, company M, beginning of 1945. This was a weapons company.

Battle of Torbole, end of April. Really I think you understand it right as ferocious as anything. You just cant parse it as less ferocious than anything else. Tarawa, Omaha Beach, whatever. US Army was ferociously opposed by the Germans there in retreat but still fighting the war. They didn’t want to give up and be taken captive.

April 29th there were some number of Germans retreating / hiding in the town of Torbole at the north end of the lake, and the US Army groups pursuing them had to approach coming down from the hills.

Dick was a 2nd Lt and did artillery spotting. There’s a strand of family lore, apparently from a war buddy’s letter home shortly after, that says he was killed by a sniper, and this happened as he was looking at the countryside through field glasses. Such that I end up being good at research, I corresponded with I guess you’d say the preeminent historian now on the 10th MD in Italy. This fella said they wouldn’t have been firing artillery into Torbole because they couldn’t have gotten those field pieces close enough what with the steep hills and minimal roads. But he said Dick could have been spotting mortar shots from the weapons company, maybe. Or trying to move forward with mortars and / or say Browning .50 machine guns.

That ambiguity doesn’t really matter. Dick was probably killed on a path descending into Torbole, He was shot in the chest. Family lore was he was shot by a sniper. This 10th MD academic said 86M had a bad time with snipers. So that’s what happened.

German military leadership in Italy agreed to surrender late on April 28th but there was just no way for everyone to hear the word. Dick was killed on the 29th. Torbole was as far as the Germans made it to retreat. The town did get mopped up on the 30th and then May 1st, and any Germans that managed to survive themselves surrendered then, I guess, as some radio instructions finally got through to them.

With Dick’s death, mundane overwhelming pain and anguish back home of the type that millions of families experienced. My grandmother was engaged to my grandfather, they married, and miscarried in either 45 or 46. My mother was their first baby, in spring 1947. I’m saying, I think Dick dying in Torbole altered people being born at home. That would also be butterfly effect mundane as a thing that happened to millions of families.

Dick was reburied in Ft. Snelling in 1949 and I think my mother remembers that from before she was 3.

That aint working: entry #1

Terminated UoM DEI Program Manager.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/04/a-dei-officer-bites-the-dust.phphttps://www.startribune.com/former-diversity-worker-sues-university-of-minnesota-after-firing-over-swastika-photo/600362010/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13357461/mashal-sherzad-sues-university-minnesota-damages-job.html

Whatever she was making… Yeah, no. She wasn’t earning it and it wasn’t a job they needed to staff ie it was a complete waste of govt money.

Yeah my character evaluation of who she is, is that she couldn’t have been a very productive employee such that she is… an influencer / model also. And not that it was the matter of these things competing for her attention. IMHO women who think they have model good looks are borderline impossible for a normal person to interact with. To say, you can have a very pretty woman in class / in the office. It aint that she’s pretty that’s a problem, and if it is it aint her problem of course. She can be model pretty. It’s if they think they have model good looks and are into model culture. That’s a problem, if that’s their personality. I’d guess it is for this gal. I’d guess she’s skated a bit her whole life because she’s pretty.

I’ll truth bomb also, "I think" being highly educated Afghan or Pakistani or Iranian in this country, you’re about as disadvantaged as if you were Chinese. Which is to say, you’re not, and "I think" you’re not really credible doing that job as her, as a pretty central asian woman. I briefly checked out her LI. Blake / Hamline. I’m kinda surprised she choose Hamline having gone to Blake, because I take it the right characterization of Hamline is its a value proposition as a private school. BUT. It does have a distinct and spicy cultural / political vibe these days, if the last year there explains anything.

Anywho, to say also… IDK how you are this person who is all sass and noise and not of disadvantaged bg and the people in the dept at the U hire you for this job… except that there’s the pretty and glamorous shiny object thing going on.

Public salary data is somewhat easily available. It should be for her, but she started this job merely last October, so there isn’t a current PDF with her in it on anyone’s website. I’ll take a wild ass guess on her salary: $135k. I’ll say it would be very easy for me to be wrong there $40k in either direction. Sometimes quasi govt jobs don’t pay as well as you think, sometimes they are cray cray.

I’m surprised she didn’t have more job protections at the U. Maybe she was in a probation period. You conjure up this scenario, maybe you foresee a hesitancy for that type org to fire this type person over ‘this issue’ where there’s a very pc prism through which to view the pro-Palestine cause. Meh, I’m not surprised that her department head fired her given the institutional temperamental prerogatives you’d understand govern a place like that.

Oh yeah she’s a glam lsebian as a Muslim woman as well. This has not gone unobserved, the LGBTQs in this country having politically aligned with retrograde Islam in the middle east. That dissonance is a hellova thing.

I’ll tell ya another gd thing, that I sussed out myself in life as a matter of personal presentation and temperamental governance. I learned it as a student of history, the news, and by navigating gun collecting. A person’s got no reason to have swastikas in their life. Don’t have them around, don’t make analyses that draws analogies to them. They’re bad.

Pop tart mongering

By my cousin

RECIPE: Triple berry pop tarts kare11.com

Oh yeah, the paint bill

The paint bill was a talker on X for say 24 hrs weeks and weeks ago. Upshot was it would have OUTLAWED, yes outlawed, oil based paint sales in 5 gallon containers to civilians ie people without a board contractors license for house painting. And the board contractors license for house painting would have been an entirely new regime.

My state senator was sponsoring it. I wrote a perfectly temperamentally responsible letter asking what’s up with that ridiculous thing. Maybe it was in March.

She got back to me just now. Fine. It’s written in this non denial denial way of people having ‘concerns’ and things being not worked out, so it won’t pass. Again, fine. Who was the pushing back in the DFL, because it certainly wasn’t you, painters union water carrier Judy.

It’s really effing weird I mean, she’s a working lawyer afaik. I don’t know why she works this, it’s not her expertise. If I get into a parade conversation with her I’m going to ask her, they draw from a hat and make you take one for the team with this?

I want to copy edit this with my snarky judgements too

I’m going to have to add a category here called “that ain’t working”, because it’s coming together that I’ve riffed on that a bit.  Which you’d hear mentally in the audio of Dire Straits “Money for nothing” song where the gruff prole bitches about the fake work that rich people do. Like, Dean Phillips “making Talenti” with a family grub stake. And to say, rich kids not taking jobs in cubes much less doing trade work. Kathy Cargill.

So that be my riff when I use that category, along with the “west suburbs” say. I got an east siders beef with the west burbs.

So……. The story of Lindsay’s restaurant itself is available in about 5-6 publications this morning.

IDK man…. I’m trying not to be unfair to her.

The reality is probably that the Pohlad’s business ventures are understood as always thoroughly vetted and serious, to the point that you’d be wrong to characterize them as vanity / hobby business by heirs and heiresses. ALTHOUGH. Carl had the famous quote about funding Bill’s movies in the early days, how do you become a millionaire. Start a billionaire and go into films. But I think Bill’s venture prolly earned money, though the timeline was family accommodating.

Lindsay there. I bet she does have a great college degree and her plan probably did have to withstand the scrutiny of the family and HER HUSBAND.

Whoever that is. See the journalistic content uniformly does not tell you that she’s married in via one of the grandsons. I find that a very odd editorial treatment, that everyones on board to not mention that explicitly lest there be judgements.

Anyway, it’d cost low millions to put this thing together she is doing. I’m sure its serious and she’s working a 40+ hr week.

Re Boller’s quote… thats not how that works. Pohlad family $ doesn’t fund the team, and the team $ doesn’t fund the family. I’d doubt there’s ever been any distributions off the Twins to the family. Or not any big ones.

KJP yo

Thing is, I don’t think you have to just be “that Republican guy” nursing an outrage reflex to be astonished at Karine Jean-Pierre, for what “that Republican guy” would call… the LYING. And she does lie, a ton. Yeah, I know the Republican equivalent lies. But the fact remains KJP lies. About the border, about Hunter Biden. About the this, about the that. You want to talk Dems lying, it’s different from Repubs on policy because it’s this thing where they don’t want to tell you how left and anti-normie and un-American their agenda is. Getting pissed on and telling you it’s raining thing. Gaslighting. And if it’s true that Dems lie more, which I doubt many Dems would agree with, I’ll just say its real because of the reality of Republicans alternately showing their asshole more, to use that idiom about “showing your asshole” to literally mean you’re showing the world you are an asshole. They don’t lie as much because they don’t care about being assholes as a matter of temperament.

Well the thing about KJP is she’s so awful at the job as matter of loquaciousness and awkwardness and “selling it”, that I think you’re anyone political and you watch her and wonder how that can’t be apparent to everyone. Like, I’ve wondered it! For a couple years! But meaning the Democrats. Like, how can this be allowed? Is the Dems cultural reality distortion epistemic loop so powerful that they don’t see that? That she’s a detriment?

Gues snot.

https://nypost.com/2024/04/26/us-news/inside-the-failed-white-house-coup-against-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre/?lctg=607d8f6170302947037f76d3

Which is good, but you actually have to get rid of her, having made the judgement.

There’s a way to use a language / narrative set and do that job speaking in forceful moral terms for the Dems. I’d say, you need a guy to do it. And that guy can be a Jen Psaki type. Which is to say a woman with some swagger and a way larger breadth of knowledge.

But it’s to say as well, KJP is someone unqualified to do that job, and she’s doing it because she’s a diversity hire. Ya know what the thing is there? Golly there’s got to be dozens of more capable black women in the Dem ecosystem who could do that job, why is one who sucks at it doing it?

I’ve been too sympathetic to this Mitchell of Woodbury

The home invader there up at her step moms place. In my first reaction a couple days ago I was like, “meh, no biggie, kind of a personal life mistake.” That’s my reflex cuz no one got hurt and I’m not a hater. I have an internal dialogue with a lot of shit talk yes, but I’m not a hater.

So this thing still doesn’t tickle my partisan outrage vibe center much, but… it is a big deal, cuz it’s a home invasion and someone could have gotten hurt.

Season 5 or so of The Sopranos, Paulie Walnuts cat burgles one of his mother’s 85 yo friends to rip off a life savings stashed under a mattress. He encounters this elderly woman and she “ends up dead”. Thing is the cosmic road was wide open for Mitchell to have that happen with her step mom, and she wouldn’t have to strangle her like Paulie did. You’re dealing with an 80 yo woman and you knock them down running for the door, they could die.

Yes the thing is a resignatable offense right now based on the pre-trial facts.

My copy editor reflex goes off cuz shit I know things about: the Northfield raid

https://www.startribune.com/an-infamous-heist-put-this-north-woods-town-in-the-global-spotlight-nervous-breakdowns-and-hollywood-deals-ensued/600360982/?

Story quote: Not since the James-Younger gang rode into Northfield has a Minnesota town been so rocked by a theft.

Oh, you’d say Northfield was ‘rocked’ by a theft when 3 outlaws were killed in the streets and 3 in the Hanska slough in Madelia and they got nothing? Rewrite that, maybe use the Bremer or Piper kidnapping or the Ma Barker holdup at Swifts.

I said it before, the reporters have a story here to mine re the old Minneapolis Jewish / non Italian gentile mob of the 60s / 70s and they aren’t doing it re this slipper story.