Merica they use precipitation and soil moisture ending at 7am tuesday mornings, so it should go down a good bit after tuesday-today's rains. but an inch a week is merely average, we need 2+ inches a week for 3-4 weeks to get back to non-drought. we've had plenty of rain earlier in the spring/winter and these big rains will keep rivers and lakes and what not fine. if its another month of hit and miss then we could have some issues with groundwater and some trees might show it, but otherwise you wont see many issues other than some dry grass. water restrictions and the like wont come unless this shit lasts all the way into next summer
this was yesterday's rainfall which is pretty not right unless there is a station there, but even then, for example, look down around atmore and brewton, radar shows heavy green but some stations reported 0.00. not to mention that giant swath of storms came straight down from huntsville and and definitely gave rain to the dry spots around cullman etc. drought measurements arent an exact science and are really only more useful longterm than short re: our water tables and everything is fine, after these rains so is grass etc. but it is a drought because we are 2-3 inches lower than average and its hot out.
also, rush propst suspended for headbutting a dude video: http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2016/06/rush_propst_suspended_for_year.html#incart_river_home
Rain is cominggggggggggg Hopefully it won't also knock down the many 100+ft tall trees in our backyard...
Can't remember his name but the guy next to the food court between the Regions and Harbert Towers is good.
Back on Track is the name of the clinic. Not sure what the doctor's name is. Think it is a weird spelling of an otherwise common name.
i am amazed we somehow have uber, uptown, lakeview, avondale, railroad park and other new things in bham in light of the general uneducated schmucks that run the city council -- There are times to play the race card, I suppose. And there are times to keep your mouth shut. Like when it comes to demeaning the Holocaust. Birmingham City Councilwoman Sheila Tyson – who once labeled the city's refusal to pay for her junket to Alaska as "apartheid" – on Tuesday went one farther. In balking at a proposal for the city to chip in on a privately funded Holocaust memorial downtown, she said this: "Dead is dead." About the Holocaust. "Isn't it stiff dead people," Tyson said "It is for dead people. Aren't the people they are memorializing deceased?" Tyson was ticked because she had previously wanted to give city money to Shadow Lawn Cemetery, an old African-American cemetery that had fallen into disrepair. "What's the difference?" she demanded. "Aren't the people they are memorializing deceased?" You had to feel for city lawyer Thomas Bentley, whose parents and buried in Shadow Lawn, as he tried to explain the difference to Tyson. He sighed. And paused. "I'm not sure I have the vocabulary or explanatory power to indicate the distinction although it's clear to me from a legal standpoint that there is a distinction," he said. He went on to say Shadow Lawn is a private entity, while the Holocaust memorial is an expression of the city's remembrance. It wasn't good enough for Tyson, who at various times – all incorrectly -- called Shadow Lawn the oldest cemetery in the state, the nation and the world. The land for the cemetery was purchased in the late 1800s, and it was used as a cemetery in the 1930s. "This is the oldest cemetery in the nation, it dates back to World War I," she said. But it's not even the oldest cemetery in Birmingham. Oak Hill is years older. "This is the oldest cemetery in the world," Tyson said. Unless you count everyone everywhere who died before the 1930s. "If this isn't a tourist attraction I want to know what is. President Obama's wife's great, great granddaddy is buried out there." That, at least, is true. Shadow Lawn is a worthy cause, with history of its own. Carpenter Dolphus Shields, Michelle Obama's great-great grandfather of Michelle Obama, was buried there in 1950. "What's the difference," Tyson said again. "I see the difference. I know the difference but I will leave it right there." That's when Councilwoman Lashunda Scales jumped in. "I know the difference," Scales said. "The difference is the haves and have nots." The Birmingham Holocaust Education Center has raised about $500,000 to build the park, alongside a 9/11 memorial near McWane Center in downtown Birmingham. Birmingham's contribution would be to remove existing structures, as a cost of $45,500. The council on Tuesday ultimately decided to table the issue for a week until questions are answered for Tyson and other council members. Rebecca Dobrinski, executive director of the Holocaust center, said she is eager to help answer them. She said she was "surprised and disappointed" about the misunderstandings. The garden is not just about dead people, she said. It will have an educational component as well as honoring victims of the Holocaust with Birmingham ties. "It is meant to teach the community of the consequences of prejudice and hate," she said. "That is the lesson of the Holocaust. "Our goal is to teach the lessons of the Holocaust ... so that we do not go down that slippery slope of hate again." It is the whole point. To remember not just who died because of bigotry, but how they died. It is to warn of the cost of faded memory and ignorance, to retell what happens when tyrants and demagogues come to power. Never forget. It appears Birmingham needs to remember.
http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/06/alabama_city_councilwoman_on_h.html#incart_most-comments ^^^ for the video.
A former Birmingham high school standout athlete arrested just two months ago on drug and gun charges was shot to death early this morning by a Shelby County sheriff's deputy. The Jefferson County Coroner's Office this afternoon identified him as Isaiah Core III. He was 20, and had previous addresses in Clay and Trussville. Core graduated from Huffman High School, where he was a quarterback on the football team, guard on the basketball team and was named a Scholar-Athlete of the Week. He went on to play college basketball at LaGrange College where he was named the USA South Rookie of the Week. He was shot to death early today after leading lawmen on a chase through two counties in a stolen vehicle and then trying to run over a Shelby County sheriff's deputy, authorities said. "It's sad to hear, knowing the potential he had,'' LaGrange College head basketball coach Kendal Wallace told AL.com today. "He just never could get on the right track to make the right decisions to stay on the right path." Today's deadly shooting began on U.S. 280 in Shelby County and ended on Oporto Madrid Boulevard in Birmingham. Shelby County sheriff's officials have provided this account of what happened: At about 2:30 a.m., Shelby County deputies were patrolling the apartment complexes and neighborhoods in the area of the Highway 280 corridor looking for criminal activity. A deputy noticed a vehicle driving suspiciously through an apartment complex and began watching it. He then saw the vehicle leave the apartment complex, being driven erratically on U.S. Highway 280. The deputy attempted to make a traffic stop on the vehicle and a pursuit began when the driver failed to pull over in response to the deputy's emergency lights and siren. The vehicle fled the scene at a high rate of speed and the chase ended when the driver exited Interstate 20 at Oporto Madrid Blvd South in Birmingham. The vehicle stopped after exiting the interstate and sheriff's deputies and assisting officers at the scene gave verbal commands to the driver and passenger to exit the vehicle to determine why they fled from officers. There was a deliberate movement of the suspect's vehicle backwards in an attempt to injure officers and a Shelby County deputy fired at the vehicle, striking the driver. Core was taken to UAB Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 3:15 a.m. His passenger, whose name hasn't been released, was taken to the Shelby County Sheriff's Office for questioning.
1 / 5 The body of a dead and decomposing man was found stuck in the burglar bars of a downtown Birmingham warehouse on Wednesday, June 22, 2016. Carol Robinson | [email protected] Print Email By Carol Robinson | [email protected] Follow on Twitter on June 22, 2016 at 7:14 PM, updated June 22, 2016 at 7:27 PM The body of a dead and decaying man was found this evening stuck in the burglar bars in the window of a downtown Birmingham warehouse. Court VanScyoc, president of Cool Breeze Inc., made the gruesome discovery at his business in the 400 block of First Avenue North just before 5:30 p.m. VanScyoc, who runs the heating and cooling company, said he stopped by the warehouse to pick up some supplies and noticed a foul odor. "I thought, 'Well, we've got rats,''' VanScyoc said. "We walked into the back warehouse area and kept talking about the smell, and then we just happened to look up. " "We looked up and we saw a man hanging from the window,'' he said. "He was obviously dead. I knew he was dead, and I knew he was a burglar." The man, an adult black male who hasn't been identified, was half in and half out of the window. From the outside of the building, the window is accessible from the ground level. On the inside of the warehouse, however, it's at least 12 feet off of the ground. "He had cut the bars but he didn't cut them the right size and it looks like he got impaled and stuck,'' VanScyoc said. "His head and his arm were hanging outside, his feet inside. I think he climbed in, didn't feel ground beneath him, his weight shifted and he got impaled." VanScyoc and police said they didn't know how long the man had been there, but said he was in the advanced stages of decomposition. "I've been here for the past couple of days and I started smelling the smell but I never noticed the man was up above the line of sight,'' he said. "We just come in and drop things off and pick things up." The business owner said he is in shock and disbelief. "I'm shaken up. My adrenalin is going,'' VanScyoc said. "It's going to be a picture I'm not going to be able to get out of my mind for some time." Birmingham police Sgt. Bryan Shelton said police received a call of a body in a window at 5:26 p.m. "It's not every day you find a body in these types of conditions, but it's something we're accustomed to dealing with,'' he said. "We will fully investigate the circumstance behind this death to give his family some peace."
Not really related aside from the bolded part, but a buddy of mine walked up to his tree stand in west Alabama one morning and found the curtain around it burned and a naked dude on all fours frozen to death inside. Apparently, the guy had been walking through the woods, fell into a creek, hypothermia set in, and he got in the tree stand, took off his clothes, started a fire to warm up, and froze to death. The pictures are bizarre.
wilder fight or sloss fest that saturday night? leaning towards wilder fight but my wife will be : / about it
Seems fishy. Starting a police chase across county lines because a car was driving suspiciously in an apartment complex and then erratically on 280. The sheriff deputies I know in Alabama joke about traffic stops and say you basically have to be committing another crime for them to even care about how you are driving.
I went to vintage video game night at Saturn last night to play in the 2001 NFL Blitz tournament and had an awesome time (even though we lost in 2OT in the semifinals on a damned fumble). The Travis Chicago Style food truck was there, and I tried it for the first time. It's fire. I recommend you find it soon. http://whattoeatinbirmingham.com/travis-chicago-style-birminghams-first-food-truck/
Blitz never was my game of choice but I've got respect for the dickheads that mastered the perpetual spin and literally could not be tackled.
That's why I fumbled. If you do get tackled in the spin, you're putting the ball on the ground. Between my turnover and my partner's drive-killing 30 yard loss on a sack/uninspired play calling, we really didn't deserve the win.
Well helllo most unexpected and random summer shower. Half inch already at house swim. Widespread rain tues
I went to the pga superstore to look at shoes. It was sunny when I walked in. Pouring when I walked out five minutes later.
AL.com is such shit now. It has been bad for a while but I feel like it has become a total joke in the recent months. It transformed from shitty online regional newspaper to shitty online regional clickbait page. All of this and much more on the front page of today's site and it's always like this nowadays. What East Alabama city has reported another bear sighting? http://www.al.com/news/anniston-gadsden/index.ssf/2016/06/what_east_alabama_city_has_rep.html 5 Things to Know about Burger King's Mac 'n' Cheetos http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2016/06/things_to_know_about_burger_ki.html#0 50 Names You're More Likely To Find In The South http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2016/06/50_names_youre_more_likely_to.html#0
You forgot 18 cats that "cant even" Their business model is shit. Its like they wanna be the end all be all for news in al (add gettin nailed from yellowhammer and others from that side) but also be the buzzfeed elite daily OMG YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT of that side to generate clicks. And when you try to do to many things you fail at both.
I mean, Yellowhammer News is complete garbage too. But yeah al.com is awful. Their layout might somehow be even worse than the content.
That dude is probably the biggest douchebag in the state. He puts himself on the "most powerful in Alabama" lists.
Grew up with the kid and he is the absolute worst. Was a little wannabe Eminem in high school who tried so hard to run with black kids and was rejected by them time and time again. Of course then he "found god" and started on his political warpath. The old republicans here look at him like baby Jesus. I am also pretty sure he is having butt sex with our state rep.
The guy from weld summed up AMG and Al.com pretty well in this op ed I read earlier today. http://weldbham.com/blog/2016/06/28/clicks-for-birmingham-red-dirt/ Spoiler: Clicks for Birmingham THE ALABAMA MEDIA GROUP’S COVERAGE OF A RECENT CITY COUNCIL MEETING EXEMPLIFIES JUST WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE STATE’S BIGGEST “NEWS” SOURCE. Before getting to the meat of this week’s screed, I’m going to offer the following simple admonition (on which I will expand several paragraphs hence): If you care about Birmingham, stop patronizing Alabama Media Group in any way. For the uninitiated, Alabama Media Group (AMG) is the largest media organization in our humble state. Operating from hubs in Birmingham, Mobile, and Huntsville, it is the purveyor of Al.com, a website the company promotes as “Alabama’s source for news, sports, entertainment, weather and more.” In addition to its flagship website, AMG distributes content through two print publications: The monthly lifestyle magazine Birmingham, and The Birmingham News, a thrice-weekly college football digest and retail circular that also reprints selected news stories, features and political commentary from Al.com. (AMG’s parent company, the New York-based multimedia conglomerate Advance Publications, also owns American City Business Journals, publisher of The Birmingham Business Journal.) Today’s Birmingham News, of course, is the reeking remnant of the metropolitan daily newspaper that served our city for nearly 125 years, from 1888 through 2012. The old News was never anything like a progressive or unifying force in this hidebound and fractious community. It reflected Birmingham’s established social and political order, rather than influencing it. Still, it was reliably adequate — and, for that matter, adequately reliable — and occasionally better than that, especially in retrospective comparison to the cruel facsimile we’re left with. Garrison Keillor once observed that, while a good newspaper is never quite good enough, a bad one is a joy forever. On the whole, the Newsfell somewhere between those two poles — not bad enough to be a joy, and not nearly good enough that its unceremonious demise nearly four years ago provoked any local outcry to speak of (as, for example, did that of the simultaneous dismemberment of its sister Advance publication, The New Orleans Times-Picayune). To be perfectly fair here, I need to stipulate that AMG is not in the newspaper business. Nor, for that matter, is it even in the newsbusiness. It is in the content business, which is the polite term for an online entity that exists only to generate clicks — i.e., “reader” views of particular items — which then are used cumulatively to sell space to advertisers, on the rather cynical premise that people are going to pay attention to the advertisement for your product or service or organization even if it is placed next to a “story” that is an uninformative, purely sensational, 200-word piece of ephemera that qualifies as “news” only in the broadest sense of the term (as it relates to Al.com, roughly a 90 percent possibility). The “journalists” at Al.com, even the legacy holdovers from the 2012 purge who are actual journalists, are conditioned to generate clicks at all costs — of depth, of nuance, of complexity — or else face the possibility of having to seek other employment. I can hear some of you already: Okay, Smart Guy. So Al.com is an upholstered trashcan. Tell me something I don’t know — and while we’re at it, aren’t you just bashing them because they compete withWeld for readers? Well, no. Admittedly, I cannot fathom why any serious reader (that’s as opposed to commenter, a certain pale-hued and reactionary type of which Al.com draws like flies to raw meat, due primarily to the fact that it allows people to spout all manner of intolerance, bigotry and outright ignorance from behind made-up usernames) would choose Al.com over Weld as a source of actual news. But I’m bashing AMG and Al.com because I would like them to stop pretending that they care about Birmingham as anything other than a trickle in their parent company’s vast revenue stream. That transparent charade of theirs is something I have learned to live with quietly most of the time. Occasionally, though, I am roused to speak up about it, in this case due to AMG’s handling of the controversy generated by a recent offering from its star columnist, John Archibald, and the response to Archibald’s column by its subject, Birmingham City Councilor Sheila Tyson. Given that Weld’s Cody Owens is working on a story about the Archibald-Tyson flare-up that will run later this week on weldbham.com, I’ll relate here just the basics of that situation: At its meeting on June 21, the Council considered an item that would allocate over $45,000 to a privately-funded Holocaust memorial in downtown Birmingham. During the discussion, Tyson — who, let us agree, is not the world’s most gifted communicator, but who, whether or not one agrees with her actions or opinions, is a fierce advocate for her district — raised the issue of why the city could find money for the Holocaust memorial, but not for Shadow Lawn Cemetery, a black burial ground in her district that has long been poorly kept, and for which she has been seeking repair and upkeep funds for years. The following day, Archibald’s column seized on Tyson’s comment that “Dead is dead” to reproach her for “play[ing] the race card” and, essentially, being anti-Semitic. More rightly (in my view), he also called out some misstatements Tyson made regarding the age of Shadow Lawn — in separate references, she called it the oldest cemetery in Alabama, the United States and in the world — and quoted interim city attorney Thomas Bentley’s attempt to draw for Tyson the distinction between city’s giving money to the privately-owned cemetery and participating in the funding of a public memorial. To his credit, Archibald also noted Tyson’s later assertion that she is not opposed to the Holocaust memorial. Now, had the ensuing column’s focus been on Tyson’s semi-comical misstatements about Shadow Lawn and even her apparent rejection of Bentley’s explanation of the city’s proposed support for the memorial…well, there might have a been a column, or there might not have been. But — and here, it is instructive to remember the “clicksuber alles” mentality at Al.com — the day was won by the “dead is dead” comment that gave the column a headline, and the apparently irresistible opportunity to trump up the kind of manufactured outrage that translates into page views. Or, as Birmingham attorney Eric Guster put it in a post to his Facebook page last week, “The fact remains that Shadow Lawn is a cemetery where black people are buried [that] fell into disrepair. Slaves and direct descendants of slaves are buried there.” While noting that he has had disagreements, including “heated discussions,” with Tyson on specific issues, he added that, “no councilperson works harder for their district than she does,” and stated that, regarding her questions about the lack of attention to Shadow Lawn, “This time, she is right.” She never said a Holocaust memorial is wrong, Guster wrote. She stated that both should get equal treatment. She is right. From my view, the real story is not whether one of our Birmingham city councilors is anti-Jewish (I do not believe that Tyson is). It’s also not the relative propriety, or even accuracy, of Archibald’s column, which — this occasionally wrong columnist will be the first to acknowledge and support — is his space to do with as he pleases. In this case, I happen to believe he was off base in his characterization of Tyson’s comments. But that doesn’t make him a bad columnist (or a bad person), any more than Tyson’s lack of polish as a communicator make her a bad city councilor (or a bad person). The real story is the reaction of John Hammontree, who manages the editorial/opinion function at Al.com (at least, I think he does; titles at AMG seem deliberately contrived to obfuscate). The day after Archibald’s column appeared, Tyson submitted to Hammontree a response to the column, for publication. When it [was] made to appear that I do not understand the scope and tragedy of the Holocaust, Tyson wrote in part, I was understandably very upset…I knew that I needed to set the record straight. It was written by [Archibald] that I “demeaned” the death of six million men, women and children, which is an incorrect statement that I refuse to allow to go unchallenged…. My point, however, remains the same: How and why do we choose whom we memorialize, Shadow Lawn [or] the Holocaust Memorial? I support both. Hammontree’s response? He refused to print Tyson’s op-ed — unless she changed it so it wouldn’t appear that she was blaming Archibald or Al.com for any misunderstanding. If she’d like to revise her op-ed to say that she misstated her case or would’ve presented her opposition differently or that her words were misinterpreted, while also clarifying her stance on the memorial, we could run that version, Hammontree wrote in an email to the city council’s director of public information, Brittany Sharp, who had forwarded Tyson’s response. But as written, it seems that Councilor Tyson is attempting to transfer blame to John Archibald and the Birmingham News. Now, I don’t know Hammontree personally, so I’m going to try to be understanding here. I’m going to acknowledge that a guy whose experience in “journalism” dates all the way back to February 2015, when he was hired by AMG, might not be aware that newspapers frequently publish letters from people who disagree with something that appeared therein, or who even try, rightly or not, to “transfer blame” for some controversial situation or perceived error to the newspaper and/or a particular reporter. Hammontree might not have learned this in his short time in the content and click-generation game, but that is one of the things that newspapers do. They stand by what they publish, and one of the ways they do that is by also publishing letters from people who take issue with their reporting. They also admit when they’re wrong. Of course, AMG has an out on that one, which is that they are not in the journalism business. They can be as wrong as they want to be — can whip up as much racial/class/religious animosity and division as they like, and exploit that which exists already — because in the moral universe in which they reside, the only thing that matters is the click, the page visit, the bottom line. Does that approach serve Birmingham well? Does it do anything to contribute to greater understanding, to build bridges between people and neighborhoods and cultures, to encourage and nurture a sense of community? Does it contribute one iota to the betterment of Birmingham? Judging by the best available evidence, the Alabama Media Group doesn’t care.
I hate al.com/AMG, but Archibald is great. There's video of Tyson's tirade; it was every bit as stupid as Archibald made it out to be, and I'm sure her response was not fit for publication. Guster is also a buffoon. Hilarious that he was sourced.