Nuff said…
Nuff said…
Something else is popping up…
Cracker Barrel Old Country Store restaurants have been around since 1969, nestled strategically off interstates to attract drivers with their convenience, southern hospitality, range of food options and affordable menu prices.
But Cracker Barrel may be losing its charm amid a physical makeover, according to some.
Rachel Love, a 38-year-old Tennessee resident and self-proclaimed Cracker Barrel fan, recently caught the restaurant chain’s attention with her social media video.
“When Cracker Barrel took away the last piece of nostalgia you had left,” Love captioned in a TikTok video last month as she showed the inside of an updated location.
Full article, HERE from Fox News.
Love them or hate them, they are much like Waffle House, McDonalds, and Chick-fil-A. Regardless of where you stopped, you knew what you were going to get food wise. Decent food, a decent price, and decent service for a sit down restaurant.
Yes, they have always been known for their ‘antiques’ that decorated their restaurants, providing a varied vista of ‘stuff’ for you and your kids to look at as you ate.
But apparently the ‘new’ makeover does away with most if not all of the antiques and nostalgia items, if the video is to be believed.
Personally, I don’t care as long as the food quality stays up, the menu is consistent, and the prices are reasonable. To me, they provide a stable alternative to fast food on a road trip, and are spaced far enough apart that you can pretty much find one either for lunch or supper, as desired.
For years, we’ve had the local Cracker Barrel on our Sunday morning rotation for breakfast for the gang, as we get good food for an affordable price, and decent service. I’d really hate to see that go away.
But that’s just me… Y’all have to make your own decisions…
Another ‘big’ building bites the dust…
So let’s suppose you borrowed half a billion dollars on a luxury high-rise with all the goodies — multimillion-dollar condos with amazing views, a Ritz-Carlton hotel, prime office space, the works. Now let’s also suppose you broke ground on your 35-story tower in 2019, less than a year before COVID and the resulting lockdowns hit.
You might start feeling a little nervous because you borrowed $510 million for a $600 million building — and your creditors would very much like their money back.
Finally, let’s suppose your primo high-rise went up in downtown Portland, just in time for the George Floyd riots — and downtown’s resulting slide into a permanent vegetative state. Business is bad. Very bad. You’ve sold just a dozen of the 132 luxury condos, leased less than a quarter of the office space, and hardly anybody wants to book a room at the Ritz.
Full article, HERE from PJ Media.
And the same thing is happening in SFO, HERE. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same isn’t true in NYC, Boston, Philly, and other major blue cities…
The truly sad part is the locals will see their taxes go up to ‘cover’ the loss of tax base from the fire sale of those buildings, OR the city services will decline due to lack of $$$ to pay for services like fire, police, EMS, etc.
And it is only going to get worse, IMHO. Investors are losing their asses, and there isn’t any good news on the horizon any time soon, as far as I can find out.
The same thing is also happening on a much smaller scale with homes where ‘investors’ were buying rental properties above market value, and now there aren’t any renters who can afford them. Also the house flippers are in trouble because they got low rate mortgages planning on flipping the houses to make money before the balloon payment requirement hit. Now…well, sucks to be them…
And we’re all seeing our house values (and property taxes) go up to fund services, with some folks seeing a doubling of house value in 10 years or less. But…most of us have very low rate loans, and those are history, plus the nicer houses we might have aspired to get or that 10 acre ranch property with the nicer house are now out of our ‘new’ price range, even if we could sell at 6-7% mortgage rates.
Best to just hang on to what we have and hunker down… Or at least that is what ‘I’ am going to do..
To commemorate the Army, Navy, and Marines!
The U.S. Postal Service is honoring three of the nation’s military branches — the Army, Navy and Marine Corps — with commemorative stamps to mark 250 years of service.
Each of the three stamps features the respective name of the military service, the service seal and the inscriptions “250 Years of Service,” “Since 1775” and “Forever/USA.”
Full article, HERE from Military Times.
For all we complain about the USPS, they have always gotten the mail to troops deployed world-wide year after year, through APO and FPO addresses.
And for many of us old farts, that was the ONLY communication we had with home in either direction. We didn’t have the intarwebz, cell phones, etc. so we actually had to write out letters, send them, then wait a month (average) for an answer.
It was truly on our SOs to ‘manage’ the homefront while we were gone, for better or worse.
And sometimes, those letters brought pictures that allowed us to share significant events that, even though we missed them, were still major events in our children’s lives.
I don’t know about any of y’all, but I’m planning on buying some of the Navy stamps to replace my Forever US flag stamps!
To start the week!
DEAR ABBY ADMITTED SHE WAS AT A LOSS TO ANSWER THE FOLLOWING:
Dear Abby,
A couple of women moved in across the hall from me. One is a middle-aged gym teacher and the other is a social worker in her mid twenties.. These two women go everywhere together and I’ve never seen a man go into or leave their apartment. Do you think they could be Lebanese?
Dear Abby,
What can I do about all the Sex, Nudity, Fowl Language, and Violence on My VCR?
Dear Abby,
I have a man I can’t trust. He cheats so much, I’m not even sure the baby I’m carrying is his.
Dear Abby,
I am a twenty-three year old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It’s getting expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don’t know him well enough to discuss money with him.
Dear Abby,
I’ve suspected that my husband has been fooling around, and when confronted with the evidence, he denied everything and said it would never happen again.
Dear Abby,
Our son writes that he is taking Judo. Why would a boy who was raised in a good Christian home turn against his own?
Dear Abby,
I joined the Navy to see the world. I’ve seen it. Now how do I get out?
Dear Abby,
My forty year old son has been paying a psychiatrist $50.00 an hour every week for two and a half years. He must be crazy.
Dear Abby,
I was married to Jack for three months and I didn’t know he drank until one night he came home sober.
Dear Abby,
My mother is mean and short tempered I think she is going through mental pause.
Dear Abby,
You told some woman whose husband had lost all interest in sex to send him to a doctor. Well, my husband lost all interest in sex and he is a doctor. Now what do I do?
Remember — these people can and DO vote
A friend who was a WESTPAC sailor with us, and later a contractor passed away this week. In the course of the notification email chain, people started remembering ‘things’ that we’d been involved it…
This is from 2007, as we dodged yet another typhoon…
Since we have another $%^& typhoon screwing up our ops, and I was tired of herding cats; three of us went out to dinner last night at Sam’s Anchor Inn in Naha. In the course of dinner, I was reminded we had all been here, in this restaurant, maybe even at this table in 1975.
That was 32 years ago!!!! Damn…
After dinner, we decided to ‘tour’ our old haunts from the 70’s (e.g. we wanted more beer); so we got a cab to China Pete’s (which used to be a one story shack selling junk souvenirs and is now a four story mini-mall).
We hoofed it down to BC street and started looking for any of the dives we used to haunt. There was not a single sleazy sailor bar left!!!! There were fern bars, upscale hostess bars, and nice well lit places; so we finally stopped into the worst bar we saw. The beer was 500 yen ($5) and they even gave us a glass! That was something you NEVER got back in the day…
Sigh… Guess I’m really an old fart…
This is a tribute, I didn’t write it, but I sure as hell can identify with it…
Remembering Airdale Bars
Airdales always stuck together. They worked and played as a crew and they gravitated to places where they could be with fellow aircrewmen, in locations where people who could tolerate the obnoxious conduct, impure verbiage and rollicking nonsense that was the standard by which the aircrew were measured. Their hallmark, so to speak.
The airdale bar was unlike other naval watering holes and dens of iniquity inhabited by seagoing elements. It had to meet strict standards to be in compliance with the acceptable requirement for an airborne sailor beer-swilling dump.
Loudmouth Barmaid.
The first and foremost requirement was a crusty old gal serving suds. She had to be able to wrestle King Kong to parade rest. Be able to balance a tray with one hand, knock bluejackets out of the way with the other hand and skillfully navigate through a roomful of milling around drunks.
On slow nights, she had to be the kind of gal who would give you a back scratch with a fly swatter handle or put her foot on the table so you could admire her new ankle bracelet some AE brought her back from a Hong Kong liberty.
A good barmaid had to be able to whisper sweet nothings in your ear like, “Sailor, your thirteen button flap is twelve buttons short of a green board.” And, “Buy a pack of Clorets and chew up the whole thing before you get within heaving range of any gal you ever want to see again.” And, “Hey animals, I know we have a crowd tonight, but if any of you guys find the head facilities fully occupied and start urinating down the floor drain, you’re gonna find yourself scrubbing the deck with your white hats!”
They had to be able to admire great tattoos, look at pictures of ugly bucktooth kids and smile. Be able to help haul drunks to cabs and comfort 19 year-olds who had lost someone close to them.
They could look at your ship’s identification shoulder tab and tell you the names of the Skippers back to the time you were a Cub Scout.
If you came in after a late night maintenance problem and fell asleep with a half eaten Slim-Jim in your hand, they tucked your peacoat around you, put out the cigarette you left burning in the ashtray and replaced the warm draft you left sitting on the table with a cold one when you woke up.
Why?
Simply because they were one of the few people on the face of the earth that knew what you did, and appreciated what you were doing. And if you treated them like a decent human being and didn’t drive ’em nuts by playing songs they hated on the juke box, they would lean over the back of the booth and park their soft warm boobs on your neck when they sat two Rolling Rocks in front of you.
Imported table wipe down guy and glass washer, trash dumper, deck swabber and paper towel replacement officer.
The guy had to have baggy tweed pants and a gold tooth and a grin like a 1950 Buick. And a name like “Ramon”, Juan”, “Pedro” or “Tico”. He had to smoke unfiltered Luckies, Camels or Raleighs. He wiped the tables down with a sour washrag that smelled like a skunk diaper and said, “How are choo navee mans tonight?
He was the indispensable man. The guy with credentials that allowed him to borrow Slim-Jims, Beer Nuts and pickled hard boiled eggs from other beer joints when they ran out where he worked.
The establishment itself.
The place had to have walls covered with ships and squadron plaques. Many of the ships and the airplanes shown in the accompanying photographs had made the trip up the river to the scrap yard or to the Davis-Monthan bone yard ten years before you enlisted.
The walls were adorned with enlarged airwing patches and the dates of previous deployments A dozen or more old, yellowed photographs of fellows named “Buster”, “Chicago”, “P-Boat Barney”, “Flaming Hooker Harry”, “Malone”, “Honshu Harry”, Jackson, and Capt. Slade Cutter decorated any unused space. It had to have the obligatory Michelob, Pabst Blue Ribbon and “Beer Nuts sold here” neon signs.
An eight-ball mystery beer tap handle and signs reading: “Your mother does not work here so clean away your dam trash.” “Hands off the barmaid.” “Don’t throw butts in urinal.” “Barmaid’s word final in settling bets.” “Take your fights out in the alley.” “Owner reserves the right to waltz your worthless ass out to the sidewalk.” “Shipmates are responsible for riding herd on their squadron drunks.”
Typical signage found in classy establishments catering to sophisticated clientele. You had to have a juke box built along the lines of a Sherman tank loaded with Hank Williams, Mother Maybelle Carter, Johnny Horton, Johnny Cash and twenty other crooning goobers nobody ever heard of. The damn thing has to have “La Bamba”, Herb Alpert’s “Lonely Bull” and Johnny Cash’s “Don’t take your guns to town” in memory of Alameda’s barmaid goddess, Thelma.
If Thelma is within a twelve-mile radius of where any of those three recordings can be found on a juke box, it is wise to have a stack of life insurance applications within reach of the coin slot.
The furniture in a real good airdale bar had to be made from coal mine shoring lumber and was not fully acceptable until it had 600 cigarette burns and your carrier’s ship numbers carved into it. The bar had to have a brass foot rail and at least six Slim-Jim containers, an oversized glass cookie jar full of Beer-Nuts, a jar of pickled hard boiled eggs that could produce rectal gas emissions that could shut down a sorority party, and big glass containers full of something called pickled pigs feet and Polish sausage.
Only drunk Chiefs and starving Ethiopians ate pickled pigs feet and unless the last three feet of your colon had been manufactured by Midas, you didn’t want to get any where near the Polish napalm dogs.
No aircrew bar was complete without a couple of hundred faded airplane pictures and a “Shut the hell up!” sign taped on the mirror behind the bar along with several rather tasteless nekkit lady pictures.
The pool table felt had to have at least three strategic rips as a result of drunken competitors and balls that looked as if a gorilla baby had teethed on the sonuvabitches.
Aircrew bars were home, but they were also establishments where 19 year-old kids received an education available nowhere else on earth. You learned how to “tell” and “listen” to sea stories.
You learned about sex at $5.00 or 20 pesos a lesson from professional ladies who taught you things your high school biology teacher didn’t know were anatomically possible. You learned how to make a two cushion shot and how to toss down a beer and shot known as a “depth charge.”
We were young, a helluva long way from home. We were pulling down slave wages for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a-week availability and loving the life we lived. We didn’t know it at the time, but our association with the men we served with forged us into the men we became.
And a lot of that association took place in Naval Aviation oriented bars where we shared the stories accumulated in our, up to then, short lives. We learned about women and that life could be tough on a gal.
While many of our classmates were attending college, we were getting an education slicing through the green rolling seas in WestPac, experiencing the orgasmic rush of a night cat shot, the heart pounding drama of the return to the ship with the gut wrenching arrestment to a pitching deck.
The hours of tedium, boring holes in the sky late at night, experiencing the periodic discomfort of turbulence, marveling at the creation of St. Elmo’s Fire, and sometimes having our reverie interrupted with stark terror.
But when we came ashore on liberty, we would rub shoulders with some of the finest men we would ever know, in bars our mothers would never have approved of. Saloons that live in our memories forever.
Oh by the way… Windproof umbrellas AREN’T in 30 plus knot winds…
Is why you should NEVER trust an AI…
xAI blamed “an unauthorized modification” for its chatbot Grok giving users off-topic and false responses about “white genocide” in South Africa this week.
Why it matters: xAI owner Elon Musk, who is from South Africa, has also
falsely accused the country of perpetuating “genocide” against white residents, a claim President Trump has also embraced.
- A South African court in February ruled there was no validity to the claims of a “white genocide.”
Driving the news: “On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” xAI said in a post late Thursday night.
Full article, HERE from Axios.com
Sooo, ‘sumdood’ got into the software and changed it to give a different answer…
Granted this is ‘rather’ high profile, but what about everyday stuff?
How many people actually trust Wiki to be correct? Anybody can ‘fix’ a Wiki entry… And a number of folks have had their Wiki pages hacked time and time again by those who don’t like them.
Now, at least that I know of, we have the first ‘official’ admission that somebody played with the code to change an AI…
Caveat emptor folks, caveat emptor!
These came over the transom from the mil side…
Somebody was having WAY too much fun with one of the AI programs.
And if you’re an old WESTPAC type… You know… LOL
Anyhoo, BZ to whomever did these, fond memories of both of them!
It was coming…
If you’re an Amazon author, you should have gotten an email from KDP. I’m putting this up so my customers and readers have an idea of ‘why’ they might be seeing changes in costs of various books.
For the first time since starting print operations almost two decades ago, starting June 10, 2025, we are changing the royalty rate for books priced below certain list prices (e.g. less than 9.99 USD) from 60% to 50%. These books represent a unique challenge given increasing operational costs and this change will allow us to continue offering these books while avoiding an impact to other titles. Separately, as part of our annual printing cost review, we are reducing color printing costs for paperbacks in some marketplaces to help authors adopt color printing. Learn more about each change below.
We’re emailing you because you have one or more print books affected by the following changes. Please visit your KDP Bookshelf to download a list of affected titles.
Royalty rates for hardcover and paperback books:
On June 10, 2025 we’ll reduce the royalty rate for print books from 60% to 50% for books priced below: 9.99 USD, 9.99 EUR, 7.99 GBP, 13.99 CAD, 13.99 AUD, 99 SEK, 40 PLN, and 1000 JPY. Books with list prices at or above the amounts listed will continue to earn a 60% royalty rate.
Printing costs for paperback books:
On June 10, 2025 we’ll reduce printing costs for the following:
- All regular and large trim size paperbacks printed in standard color and purchased from Amazon.com.
- All regular and large trim size paperbacks printed in premium color and purchased from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.es, Amazon.it, and Amazon.nl.
We’ve already seen a drop in royalties from KU, and we’ve been batting this back and forth for the last year. I’m honestly surprised it’s taken this long for this to happen.
Some folks will probably raise the price of their books to get above that $9.99 price point, but since all of mine are already over that due to page length, I’m not impacted by ‘this’ go round.
Printing costs were raised in 2023, so I’ll be curious to see if my print rates actually drop or not, since I don’t go for the funky stuff on my covers.
At least for now, there is no change to the Kindle royalty rates for the ebooks…for now…
But I don’t have a better option for folks. Sorry…
First up is a new book from Holly Chism, The Passing of the Age
As always, click on the cover for the Amazon link!
The blurb-
Once, gods and Titans went to war because humanity existed and the Titans…didn’t like that. Will, the blacksmith’s apprentice, was born long after the war’s bitter, destructive, last gasp. It left the land scarred, leaving behind the Wastes, a massive pit in the landscape, dug by poisoned magic. The old world was lost in the ashes, and survivors were left with so little that any who didn’t pull their weight (or had something someone powerful wanted) were exiled to starve in the Wastes.
Just. Like. Will.
Cast out to the Wastes because his father remarried and his stepmother had wanted her children to inherit, he turned to his master, the smith. The smith, who had held Will back to keep using his labor for free, refused to go against the rest of the village, angry though he was to lose Will’s labor. In lieu of the honestly-earned status of journeyman that would have protected Will from exile, his master gave him a bag of grave goods: a hammer (but not a good one), tongs (that were rusting to pieces), and a file (more than half worn out). And two small coins to pay the ferryman when he reached the river dividing life from death.
Will entered the wastes with the clothes on his back, inadequate grave goods, and determination to live through it, in spite of his village. And a mission given him by the Land, and by the god of the wild places, to take the knife he made with his grave goods to the very center of the Wastes. There, he will find his destiny.
Next up is John David Martin with a series of short stories, The Lost Sword and Other Stories
The blurb-
Jared Thorne: A para-human detective and his dryad wife hunting for a legendary lost sword in a multi-dimensional city.
Eysteinn Bjarnarson: A descendant of the viking who settled North America fighting to win the love of the town beauty. His only opposition? A monster of Indigenous Canadian legend and…her father.
Captain Faust of the North American Marine Corps: A descendant of one Dr. Johannes Faust who learns some deals are heriditary. But can they be re-written?
Milo “Wolfkiller” Patel: A teenage bullrider on an alien world facing the challenge of his young career.
Pawel and Tamar: Newlywed asteroid miners whose wedding cruise from the trans-Martian orbit out to the belt turns deadly.
These are the characters whose stories I have faithfully recorded for you here.
Last, but not least, another anthology from Raconteur Press, Moggie Noir: Dames, Derringers and Detectives
The blurb-
In this iteration, Moggie Noir is more than a framework, it’s a mewed.
I feel it is safe to say that we are most inspired by the creative expressions of authors who view genre notes for story calls as a guideline, and who then proceed to stretch the idea like Coney Island saltwater taffy. In this way, we have not been disappointed. The trick is to tug at the theme but still have the recognizable touches that tell the reader this is a noir story rather than a slapstick comedy or big fish story.
So, in this taffy-pulling spirit, we bring you our third Moggie Noir salvo, “Dames, Derringers, and Detectives.” This gritty set of tails will have you rooting for the good guys, hissing at some bad cats, and maybe—just maybe—you’ll see how true love can win in the end.