Hugh's Worthless Blog

Back in August I never would have believed I would be posting about the Cardinals winning the World Series, but sure enough they won the whole thing in dramatic fashion. So now it is time to celebrate... by buying  Cardinals World Series 2011 Champions gear! But what is up with the official "authentic World Series" caps? Someone decided the winning cap should be this ugly black and white two-tone thing, when everybody knows any real St. Louis Cardinals cap should be solid red (or at least blue with a red bill and the red cardinal in front.) These black and white things are just not very appealing, especially when you look online and can find that red 2011 World Series caps have been designed. Unfortunately if you go to any retail store in St. Louis all you find are the ugly black and white things. We did get some T-shirts, but I am not spending $30 on a Cardinals cap with barely any red on it! Even checking the Sports Authority on-line, all the red World Series caps are...

The 49ers put an appropriate end to the St. Louis Rams sad 2009 season by clobbering them in the second half to insure that the Rams maintain the worst record in the NFL. The Rams were actually leading 3-0 at the half, but I am sure most people assumed they would collapse in the second half, and they did so in typical fashion. I had wondered if we would see a Rams' victory or a real snowstorm first this winter, and it looks like the storm should win. They are again forecasting snow this week (Wednesday evening into Thursday morning) and we can all see if anything materializes this time. We actually received more snow than they predicted two Sundays ago (Dec 27) so you never know which way it will go. I know that snow made our church service attendance plummet even though the roads were not all that bad. And right now we get to experience this lovely cold wave that is making my walk from the Metrolink station to our building quite a cold one. I am anxiously awaiting the 2010 op...

I know it is not easy to predict the weather here in the midwest, but you must love how the TV news stations like KSDK love to play up the slight possibility that we might be getting snow at some point in the near future. Early last week I remember Cindy Preszler saying it did not look like we would be having a white Christmas, but then by the weekend they had changed their prediction to a possibility of a snow storm on Wednesday the 23rd or perhaps Christmas Eve. Now it looks like it will most likely be all rain for us in St. Louis on both days. They are just trying to drive up viewer numbers for their news programs, but do they really need to even attempt to predict the weather over a week in advance when we all know their odds of getting it correct is pretty slim? As I state in the title, it seems we are as likely to see the Rams win a game this season as we are to see a snow storm in St. Louis in the next few weeks. The Rams actually had a shot this past weekend against Houst...

The biggest neighborhood news last week besides the reopening of the highway , was the discovery that the reported rape and burglary along McKnight in Ladue was a complete fabrication . The pictured woman, Virginia Burns, was not even in the area on that evening and made the whole story up. The Ladue Police report they spent about 300 hours investigating the crime, so if use a conservative $50/hr rate that would be $15,000 of police time spent looking into this supposed crime when they could have doing other work. It is hard to imagine what would make someone decide to make up such a story, including pretending to be disabled, and then claiming both a rape and a burglary along a street where very few people even walk during the day, let alone at night. North of the highway there are no sidewalks on McKnight Road. The 400 block where she claimed she was attacked is curved and quite wooded and not pedestrian friendly at all. I would personally only walk along McKnight down by Tilles ...

Well, my last posting was when the Cardinals were only down one game to zero against the Dodgers, on the day of the second game. It was a much more hopeful time for the Redbirds. Alas, so much for their season, and now we get to wait until Spring and watch the Rams lose to every team in the NFL. I may have to follow Blues hockey more and cheer for the Mizzou Tigers instead, as well as the mighty Wash U Bears (but, of course!) One interesting tidbit I found on the Post-Dispatch site was a salary database of every single employee of every public school district in the state of Missouri. Unfortunately stltoday.com uses these massive URL's that are almost unreadable so I hope my link works. It is very informational, but it does seem to be an invasion of privacy of some sort. Not only can you find out how much anybody paid for their home in the county or city of St. Louis, but you can find the salary of any public employee? The database link at http://www.stltoday.com/info has a t...

What a dreary, yucky day in St. Louis! Today it looks like rain all day so I skipped my usual walk to the bus stop and just drove to the Brentwood Metrolink station instead. That sure is a quick little drive and a lot drier! Of course, today is also dreary because of the Cardinal's loss to the Dodgers last night. Let's see if Adam Wainwright can help tie up this series. At least the rain is supposed to let up this weekend for the playoff games here. The one bright spot of the Dodgers winning last night is that if the Cards win tonight it guarantees two games here in St. Louis. So what else is new since I last posted a month ago? Now that it is October, I could talk about the approach of Windows 7, but I think Microsoft already gets enough free publicity. Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) will be released just a week later on the 29th, and it is completely free! I have not tried it yet myself since I run the 8.04 LTS release Hardy Heron on most systems, but it is supposedly a much fa...

Time to switch gears completely and talk about what happened this weekend in St. Louis football, from high school to college to professional. This was the weekend when we saw local high school teams excel, the state powerhouse football program have one half of a great game, and our highly compensated professional team fall flat on its embarrassing face. Let's start with High School football. For the past decade, St. Louis area high schools routinely make it to the state finals to get beaten by some team from the Kansas City area. But this was the year in a while for not just the St. Louis area, but for one area district to actually win two state championships! The Hazelwood School District is now the home to both the Missouri Class 6 and the Class 5 champions with the Hazelwood Central Hawks and the Hazelwood East Spartans. East won first on Friday night with a final second "Hail Mary" touchdown to win their championship over Raytown South, and then on Saturday Central w...

It's 2008, and I was quite happy to see both Missouri and West Virginia win their bowl games, although I was hoping they would both win their final games and face each other in the BCS bowl. Of course, if I had written that here in my blog days before that final weekend I would have jinxed them for sure. WVU had a decent chance against Pitt even close to the end since the game was fairly close, but they failed to finish any of their drives with a TD. Why did they look so much better against Oklahoma than Pitt? It's hard to imagine. But moving on to more geeky matters, the latest distro I have tried and now installed on one of the older systems in my office is the brand, spanking new PCLinuxOS "MiniMe" 2008 LiveCD. This is a 300MB download that runs as a LiveCD but also includes an installer for installing PCLinuxOS on your hard drive. There are not too many applications included, but since you have Synaptic and an internet connection, you can install whatever you lik...