Ahh, cooler temps. Love it. It’s Wednesday morning, it’s overcast, it’s 69 degrees and there’s an extra bounce in my step, not gonna deny it. Fall isn’t far away.
Have you seen this summer’s hit movie “Rocketman?” It’s described as “an epic musical fantasy about the uncensored human story of Sir Elton John’s breakthrough years.”
It doesn’t disappoint. Great look into the background of the music man, including his uncomfortable childhood. There is a hard to watch scene or two but the music alone is reason enough to check it out.
Elton John, by the way, marked a milestone in his recovery from his addiction troubles this week. The artist is nearly 30 years sober. “Rocketman” detailed many of the excesses in his life.
Elton John is now 72 years old, in case you were wondering.
Please keep the mental state of Parkville Mayor Nan Johnston in your thoughts and prayers. There’s a lot of arcing going on up there.
By the way, an arc flash happens when electric current flows through an air gap between conductors.
I don’t know about you but I’m starting to get the hint Parkville Mayor Nan Johnston doesn’t take kindly to less than positive news coverage or less than positive reaction by anyone to her administration. When she gets upset at the media posing simple questions or others who don’t agree with her actions and processes, Johnston gets on her computer and sends out angry mass emails, even carbon copying people who have absolutely nothing to do with whatever topic has flipped her switch. She’ll carbon copy random county officials, random city workers, various business owners, the dog catcher, the milkman, the mailman, the pizza delivery boy and the cable guy. Everybody but her therapist, apparently.
Some folks call this type of action “building a mob mentality,” intended to try to intimidate. And maybe intimidation is her intention. But I consider it more like the insecure high school cheerleader who gets her feelings hurt then tries to rally her friends to also be mad at whoever it is that hurt her feelings. It’s like Nan is living out one of those campy teen movies from the 1980s.
So I’m gonna go slide into some Jordache jeans and perm my hair.
Or maybe I’ll tie a sweater around my neck and play the role of the preppy douchebag villain.
No one likes to admit when they’re wrong but I’ve got to do it right here. I never thought we’d see a local elected official get consistently more unhinged than Kathy Dusenbery in her days of temper tantrums and tirades.
I stand corrected.
And it is glorious.
Cooler-than-normal temperatures made for a darn fine time at the Platte County Fair this year. There was a good crowd for opening night last Wednesday but I’m guessing the largest crowd was Friday, which was demo derby night. Cars were backed up on I-29 leading to the Tracy exit. Cars were also backed up on Hwy. 92 through Platte City on the way to Tracy. I haven’t seen fair traffic like that in years.
We had a good time doing a Landmark Live show from the fair on opening night. More than 7,200 viewers, which either means folks were anxious for fair info or they were simply excited to see the on-screen debut of office manager Cindy Rinehart.
It seems like there almost isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t hear of an internet outage such as Facebook, Google, Delta, etc or data breaches such as Equifax causing destruction and frustration.
That being the case, the guest on our Landmark Live this Thursday night will be Aaron Rinehart, a nationally recognized figure in the field of cybersecurity.
Rinehart, a 2001 graduate of North Platte High School, has spent his career solving challenging tech problems for organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security, NASA, and the Department of Defense. Now he is founder and chief technology officer at a Silicon Valley startup called Verica. He and his co-founder pioneered the application of a concept called chaos engineering while at Netflix and UnitedHealth Group.
Rinehart has been a featured speaker at several media conferences, most notably the National Press Club. He has been interviewed and quoted in various publications, including Huffington Post, Dark Reading (not totally familiar with it but I’m guessing it’s not that magazine some of us would keep under our beds in middle school) and MarketWatch. He is in the area this week for a speaking engagement at Cerner.
And if his last name sounds familiar it’s because, yes, he is the son of Landmark office manager Cindy.
(Want more Between the Lines? Follow Foley on Twitter and Facebook, watch Landmark Live videos on Facebook and YouTube, or email the publisher at ivan@plattecountylandmark.com)