Still A Lot Going On

A couple of posts ago, I said that Mother Nature would be dropping the winter hammer on us and she did.  For about a week we had high temps between 12 and 20 above and a couple of light snowfalls here.  Areas to the north and east, such as Omaha and Lincoln, really got pounded with cold and heavy snow, but again, we got off kind of light.  The cold is leaving town.  Today the high was about 39 and by Saturday it's supposed to be 55 to 60, and already the snow here is about gone.  

All indications are that we will have an early spring.  It is still January and daily we see flocks of waterfowl heading north.  Yup, north.  The wild critters know something our forecasters don't.  I've looked closely at some of the trees here, but I don't see any sign of new buds, which will be the ultimate signal that spring is at hand.  Of course, some of the worst blizzards in the history of  America occurred in March, so stay tuned for the latest.  With the weather, nothing is ever certain.

Okay, so Terri again knew who the mystery celebrity was.  Eugene Maurice Orowitz, of course, was the true name for Michael Landon, Bonanza's Little Joe.  Let's see how well she does with Alexandra Cymboliak Gluck.  Anybody who thinks he or she knows the screen name for this late actress is invited to post a comment at the end of the post.  It immediately sends me an email.

I mentioned in a previous post about an 11 year old boy whose mother came up from Georgia to drop him off under Nebraska's safe haven law as "uncontrollable".  I read that the boy, now 12, has been placed in Boys Town, based in Omaha.  If you haven't heard of Boys Town, you have missed a lot.  Go to Netflix and rent the movie with that name, or simply Google "Boys Town". The film starred Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan, the founder, and Mickey Rooney, as a troubled youth who prospered under Flanagan's guidance.  Boys Town is still working miracles with young people on whom society had simply given up.  It's interesting to note that Spencer Tracy won a best acting Oscar for his performance as Father Flanagan.  After receiving his trophy, he made a special plate and had it installed on the award.   The plate inscription dedicated the statuette to Flanagan and congratulated him on his life's work.  He then sent the Oscar to the priest at Boys Town, where it remains on display to this day.  

If we were to have a theme here of "The good, the bad and the ugly", we'll make the Boys Town item "the good", and the following will be "the bad".

 The state troopers made another big drug bust on I-80 this past week and it is one of the biggest hauls in Nebraska history.  Police stopped a $200,000.00 motor home with California plates because the driver was cruising along the shoulder of the road.  Why?? Who knows.  The trooper thought something was wrong with the answers he was getting to some simple questions so he called for a car with a drug sniffing dog.  The dog signalled a drug find when he entered the vehicle.  Police pulled up the carpet on the floor in the rear and found a secret compartment with 236 pounds of cocaine in in 1 kilo bricks.  We are talking multi-millions of dollars here.  The driver, his wife and their 21 year old daughter are going to be in this state for a long, long time.  Why do these yo-yos do things that attract the officer's eye?  Who knows?  Of course, we only hear about the ones they caught.  I wonder how many get through without a sweat.  Hmmm.  Unpleasant thought.  

Ok, now for the ugly.  I send a lot of emails to my friends out in the internet world and a lot of them are forwards of mails I receive.  There are a lot of creepazoids out there who love to secretly raid the forwarded emails because they can see the addresses of the people it's been sent to.  They use that information to flood those addresses with spam or bogus offers for scams of all kinds.  I try to make sure that when I forward emails, I use the edit function to "select all", copy it to the notepad, open a new email and paste what I copy.  I then select and delete the portions at the top that contain the email addresses of previous recipients.  Now they are not subject to possible spam assaults as a result my forwarding it.  When I select those to whom I am sending it, I use the "bcc" function, which means "blind copy" and hides the names and email addresses of those to whom I send it.  My email client is Thunderbird, which to me is 500% superior to Outlook,which I refuse to use mainly because it is a Microsoft product (that's another story).  With Thunderbird, when I pick the name from the contact list, I right click and have to the "bcc" option.  It's very easy to do.  When my friends receive an email from me and it says, "recipents suppressed", it merely means that I have used bcc for all those to whom it was sent. Nobody with a program that tries to steal email addresses can use my friends as targets.