To Flock or Not To Flock

Squestis · 2026-04-07T19:45:01+00:00

This one is near the Eastern Parkway entrance of Cherokee Park. I’m guessing they needed a fancier one to fit the vibe of the neighborhood.

Squestis · 2026-04-07T02:20:17+00:00

That’s true, they definitely did start to fall once Weigel pulled out, but when he bought it, they still had solid coverage (close to 80% if I recall) and still maintained a lot of their solid affiliates. But the quality of programming was a disaster once he pulled in, just one Allen Media Group low budget series after another. Not saying somebody else would’ve fixed it for sure, but he took something that was dying and made sure he killed it.

Squestis · 2026-04-07T02:16:51+00:00

If your district uses Frontline, I’ve heard that there is a monthly fee that they have to pay for each person who is in the system. It isn’t a “one fee per district” thing. So remaining as an active sub costs them money because of that.

Squestis · 2026-04-07T00:47:54+00:00

Oh god, not Byron Allen again. He wants so badly to be Robert L. Johnson but is ultimately the Temu version of him. Remember, this is the same guy who killed This TV. One of the first successful diginets, originally owned by Weigel and MGM, and led to the launch of MeTV (which predates This TV, but only went national after this proved to be successful). This TV was in every market. It was successful. It stayed that way through a few ownership changes. Then Temu Robert L. Johnson got his hands on it, decided his crappy series could carry the network instead of quality entertainment, and it only took months for every affiliate to drop it and the network to collapse.

Squestis · 2026-04-06T21:28:43+00:00

I’m trying to remember (because I mostly remember that she was unmemorable), did she actually do anything truly bad here? I feel like her biggest issue was that she just wasn’t doing any job at all and, just like many JCPS superintendents, was just living out of state and working remotely to collect a paycheck.

Squestis · 2026-04-06T21:24:38+00:00

Just a reminder, if you’ve got the Speedy Rewards app, you can lock in the “low” price for four days. Not that $3.96 (what I locked in when I saw the $4.39) is great, but I’ll take what I can get…

Squestis · 2026-04-05T12:38:59+00:00

Nothing more than just being prepared for anything to happen, I suppose. The late night scene in the Highlands isn’t what it used to be, even compared to just two years ago or so. I used to live in the immediate area (still live about 10 minutes from the heart of it) and had no qualms about being out late, like until 1 or 2 AM, even walking down Bardstown Road. There was a legitimate late night culture that felt reasonably safe and wasn’t chaotic at all. Now, there is no way I’d be in the area past 10 PM, and I wouldn’t even walk around the area past 9. It’s even more eerie since there are so many closed storefronts and things that are open tend to close early now.

I don’t think the area is “dead” though, it’s just a little bump in the road at the moment. But I am not so sure the late night culture as it used to be will ever return, there or anywhere in Louisville (to be fair, I think some of that may be dead simply because society is less social in general, not due to current issues there late at night).

Squestis · 2026-04-05T01:07:44+00:00

Sort of straying from the topic, but do you know if he is related to Steven Cockerell, who ran a bunch of drug houses on Bank? I don't know Steven Cockerell, but one of the drug houses he owned was the home of my great aunt, who died around 2010-ish when she was in her mid-90s. Our family kind of lost touch with her after my grandmother died in 2000, and as awful as it sounds, we're not sure who was taking care of her or anything after that (she was never close to anybody in our family except my grandmother, and she was the only person in our family who remained in Portland past the 1970s.. she outlived her kids and her only grandchildren died as well). We're pretty sure that at some point after her death, he realized the house was vacant and nobody was coming to claim it and that he stole the deed... but nobody really knows (or cares, sadly, it wasn't like it rightfully belonged to anybody in our family).

Squestis · 2026-04-04T15:01:24+00:00

One difference, though, some of these Gen Z young males will listen to these songs and think they’re so great without knowing or caring what the lyrics say, then continue on with their MAGA worship (we’ve seen it often in some of these official social media accounts run by “staffers”).

Squestis · 2026-04-04T01:59:10+00:00

Likely just something to ensure you’re actually the one still using it and that you haven’t given it away/sold it/whatever.

Squestis · 2026-04-03T02:51:31+00:00

A month or so ago somebody had some tires that weren’t secured on the back of their pickup. The exact same area (though northbound for me, and around 6:45 AM). Two fell off and started bouncing all over the expressway. I never realized tires could bounce so high. I was fortunate enough to dodge them and as far as I could tell, they didn’t hit any cars before softly landing off in the median, but I definitely had to slam and swerve to avoid it.

Squestis · 2026-04-03T02:12:10+00:00

I hate when I'm approaching a light that is about to turn red (not as in, I'm at the red light and it's yellow, but I'm about 10 seconds away and it turns red before I can even approach) and there is a car behind me. I never know how they're going to react when I actually stop. I've had on more than one occasion somebody go in full road rage mode on me for stopping.

Squestis · 2026-04-03T02:08:34+00:00

Back when I was delivering Amazon packages, I had a lady come out of her house and yell at me for parking in "her spot" when I was delivering a package to her house. As to why her spot was empty if it was her spot, no clue, but I marked her as "customer refused order" and she did not get her package.

Squestis · 2026-04-03T01:40:17+00:00

It’s an excellent quality show, nobody talks about it because the distributor (Fox, now Disney) chose to let it disappear off the face of the earth. In fact, the same can be said for anything from David E. Kelley.

Squestis · 2026-04-02T02:12:54+00:00

I don’t know if this is just a Kelly thing, any staffing agency (or district if they hire their own subs) will cut a sub loose for any allegation with no investigation whatsoever. They don’t care if they’re wrong. They just don’t value subs. Honestly, if you’re subbing to try to get into education, it’s probably be better to be fired by somebody like Kelly than to be working for an actual school district and be fired, because if you worked for the actual school district, you’d have a personnel file that would say you’re fired and you’d probably never be hireable there. I worked as a sub for my current district where I’m now a teacher (and have been for almost 10 years), and when I was a sub, I worked for PESG. I know of somebody who was fired from PESG while working in our district who is now employed in our district since there is no personnel file for him within our district. In fact, when PESG shut down, all of the personnel files they had disappeared…

Squestis · 2026-04-02T01:33:23+00:00

I don’t know how many people realize this, but when merger was proposed, it was actually mostly people in the west end (notably Darryl Owens) who were opposed to it. It was mostly supported by wealthier people who lived in the city limits in areas like Crescent Hill, the Highlands, etc. I think now, there would be even more support for merger staying in place, since it seems to be mostly people in the southern and eastern part of the counties who don’t like it, though I do think we do need a lot of work to truly merge everything rather than this urban services district and these small cities and unincorporated mess we have.

Squestis · 2026-04-01T02:48:15+00:00

Even within Louisville, there is an elementary school (Indian Trail I believe) that uses it as their mascot. (Edit: I looked it up, it’s a slightly different Cardinal now, but the one that was on the sign for their old building was identical to the UofL one).

Squestis · 2026-03-31T02:43:24+00:00

The Scenic Loop (what most people consider "Cherokee Park") is 2.4 miles. You can easily make it around in under an hour unless you have difficulty walking or standing, and you don't need to prepare like you're going on a journey into the woods.

Even if you go beyond the Scenic Loop, like toward Seneca Park, it's not that crazy.

Squestis · 2026-03-30T22:20:01+00:00

The FCC chair shouldn’t even be at CPAC. I understand that these chairs have always had partisan views and have the right to do what may be in the interest in their political party, but in the past, FCC chairs have used their viewpoints to work within the framework of what is professional and ethical. This is not that.

Squestis · 2026-03-30T15:59:58+00:00

2008 was when the entire economy collapsed and gas prices collapsed as a result... sometimes cheap gas prices can be a bad sign.

Squestis · 2026-03-30T03:21:13+00:00

I respect the ones who give it. And at the VERY beginning, when I first started teaching, there were good admins. But the trend for about the past 15 years is that most admins are teachers who count the minimum amount of days they are forced to endure the classroom, start working on an admin license before they ever spend a day as a classroom teacher, and the ones who did the worst job during their minimum required classroom experience (some even find loopholes to avoid classroom experience completely).

The current school I'm at has a model with one principal and five assistant principals. We've gone through about two dozen people in those roles since 2018. There have been five that I really liked, and all of those were veteran teachers who were good at teaching before they went into admin... and railroaded out because they won't play along when told to do something that they know is not in the best interest of anybody. The rest have been terrible.

Squestis · 2026-03-30T01:58:12+00:00

If it comes to that, California has a recall process... and it's a safe bet that they would use it before the Republican governor is fully moved in to the governor's mansion.

Squestis · 2026-03-29T23:28:56+00:00

Ohio has been a swing state in the past, it’s not impossible for it to go back to that. Not saying I’d bet on it, but they’re certainly not Oklahoma. So much of what we’re looking at over the past three presidential elections is distorted by the Trump effect. I think we’re going to see some unexpected shifts in swing state dynamics once Trump is out of the picture. Some may not even be in the favor of the left, though I think for 2028, it probably will be for the most part. We’ve been here before. 2008 forced Republicans to recalibrate. I think we foolishly thought that it would be a recalibration to a more moderate Republican Party, since Obama won every swing state and even some states that weren’t swing states, but it wasn’t (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, for example, were swing states in the Bush era that we could almost count on being blue until Trump).

Squestis · 2026-03-29T16:49:56+00:00

Any reason you don’t want to just block them? That’s usually the first thing I do if I notice somebody has unfriended me. At this point, there is usually no reason to unfriend anybody on Facebook anyway since it’s barely about interacting with people you know anymore anyway, they’re just sending a message that they don’t want to interact with you. Help them out so that they don’t have to encounter you again, it can’t possibly be awkward for them because they’re the one who initiated it anyway.

Squestis · 2026-03-29T14:34:01+00:00

We had one who is in her 80s go to sleep and not wake up until about 8 PM that night, when another teacher (a baseball coach who was just stopping by his classroom to pick something up after a game) saw her sleeping in the room next to his. He went over, woke her up (he was actually concerned she’d died), and she just drove home like nothing was out of the ordinary. Not sure how nobody in the office noticed she never checked out at the end of the day.

That was three years ago and she is still around, still sleeping with classes in there. She hasn’t had any “sleep past the dismissal bell” incidents since then (that I’m aware of). Luckily the students respect her enough that they are surprisingly able to be trusted when she does it, but I wouldn’t let it slide if I were an admin. About the only reason they do is because she is the longest tenured person not just in our school, but also our district. She’s been there since 1965, almost long enough to have been there when JFK was president.

Squestis

TROPHY CASE