New Years Day Blog: Some wintry weather! Here is the latest. -Doug

Happy New Year everyone!  I hope you have had a great New Years Eve and enjoy the begging of 2022.  We do have to deal with some weather and our first arctic blast of the season.  What a joy!

Winter weather advisories in affect for areas along and north of I-44.  Rain continues to increase through the early morning hours.  By dawn, this will be freezing rain in our far NW counties.

Moderate rain continues through the morning.  Freezing rain in SE KS.  We could have a little build up of ice, but I think it will switch to sleet fairly fast.  By the noon hour, that freezing line will be near the metro area.

Good news is, by this time the heaviest of the moisture will be out of here.  So during the afternoon just very light freezing rain or drizzle mixed in with a little sleet.

By late afternoon.  Just very light sleet and light snow.  Temperatures falling fast, so if the roads are wet, they will freeze.  Watch out for that.  During the overnight hours a little band of very light snow will rotate through.

After 2 or 3am, this should be all out of the region.  Here is what I am thinking on totals.

Pretty heavy sleet in our northern counties which will cause some issues on the roads.  Everyone else, a glaze of ice to 1/10th of and inch, so no issues on power lines is my thinking right now.  Then a dusting to 1/2″ of snow on top of that.  Overall, I am not to concerned from this storms system which is great news.

Long range below.

-Doug

Next Friday and Saturday:  Warming back up by the weekend.

Jan. 9th-15th: Chilly for the first half of the week. Rain and snow chances Monday and Wednesday. Cold and dry for the rest of the week.

Jan. 16th-22nd: Mainly chilly for this week. Slight rain chances on Monday and Friday.

Jan. 23rd-30th:  Rain chances on Monday and Tuesday. This could mix with a little snow on Tuesday.  Then a chilly week with warmer temperatures by the weekend with rain chances.

City offers tips to prepare for winter weather conditions

JOPLIN Mo. – Recent forecasts advise of incoming winter weather and the City of Joplin would like to remind people that cold weather and precipitation can create health and safety risks.

As the cold front approaches, it is a good time to review safety tips and make preparations to reduce the risk of injury or property issues for you and your family.

Stay in touch during this cold spell. By staying in contact, families and friends can help take care of each other if a household experiences any issues during this time.

Prepare an emergency kit

The items listed below should be part of your basic emergency kit and kept in a container that can be easily carried:

  • Water and canned or dried food – families should set aside one gallon of water per person per day, to last three days, and a three-day supply of food per person. The food should be nonperishable items that don’t need to be cooked, such as tuna and crackers. Remember to include a manual can opener. If there’s an infant in the house, include formula and baby food.
  • Battery-powered radio
  • Flashlight
  • Extra batteries for the radio and flashlight
  • Prescription medications
  • First-aid kit
  • Copies of insurance policies, deeds and other important records

More tips from the city

  • Layer clothing with loose-fitting lightweight items – Dress warm and stay dry.
  • Know the warning signs for hypothermia, an abnormally low body temperature.
  • Monitor tasks such as shoveling snow, pushing stranded vehicles, or even walking can cause exhaustion and overexertion leading to heart attacks.
  • Practice proper fire safety precautions: never leave a fire unattended; use space heaters according to manufacturer’s instructions.
  • Running water, even at a trickle helps prevent pipes from freezing.

 

Barrel Bash comes to Carthage for New Year’s Eve

CARTHAGE, Mo. – Double B Productions hosts their Barrel Bash year-end event this weekend at Lucky J Steakhouse and Arena.

Barrel Bash is a timed horse-racing event for all ages from 9:00 a.m. on Friday, until 5:00 p.m. on Sunday.

Kids as young as four-years-old can race around the course, competing against the fastest time.

According to announcer Daniel Bacorn, “There will be a lot of money, a lot of fast horses, and a lot of good competition.”

Besides prizes and cash, craft tables will have jewelry, clothing, and leather goods for sale.

For more information on this year’s Barrel Bash, click here.

 

 

 

Today in history (Dec. 31)

Today is Friday, Dec. 31, the 365th and final day of 2021. This is today in history.

Today in history

  • In 1879, Thomas Edison first publicly demonstrated his electric incandescent light by illuminating some 40 bulbs at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
  • In 1904, New York Times Square saw its first New Year’s Eve celebration, with an estimated 200,000 people in attendance.
  • In 2019, the health commission in the central Chinese city of Wuhan announced that experts were investigating an outbreak of respiratory illness and that most of the victims had visited a seafood market in the city; the statement said 27 people had become ill with a strain of viral pneumonia and that seven were in serious condition.

Politics

  • In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed an enabling act paving the way for Virginia’s western counties to become the state of West Virginia, which took place in June 1863.
  • In 1946, President Harry S. Truman officially proclaimed the end of hostilities in World War II.
  • In 2011, President Barack Obama signed a wide-ranging defense bill into law despite having “serious reservations” about provisions that regulated the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.

Entertainment

  • In 1972, Major League baseball player Roberto Clemente, 38, was killed when a plane he chartered and was traveling on to bring relief supplies to earthquake-devastated Nicaragua crashed shortly after takeoff from Puerto Rico.
  • In 2016, Mariah Carey ushered in 2017 with a botched performance on “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest” on ABC; Carey blamed the show’s producers for technical difficulties, while Dick Clark Productions called Carey’s claims “absurd.”

Local News

  • In 2010, Tornadoes fueled by unusually warm air pummeled the South and Midwest, killing a total of eight people in Arkansas and Missouri.
  • In 2015, Water was restored to folks in Reding’s Mill after flooding overwhelmed the city’s pumps and wells along with homes.
  • In 2018, The Lords Diner served hot meals to those in need in Pittsburg, Kansas.

Birthdays

TV producer George Schlatter is 92. Actor Sir Anthony Hopkins is 84. Actor Tim Considine (TV: “My Three Sons”) is 81. Actor Sarah Miles is 80. Actor Barbara Carrera is 80. Rock musician Andy Summers is 79. Actor Sir Ben Kingsley is 78. Producer-director Taylor Hackford is 77. Fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg is 75. Actor Tim Matheson is 74. Pop singer Burton Cummings is 74. Actor Joe Dallesandro is 73. Rock musician Tom Hamilton (Aerosmith) is 70. Actor James Remar is 68. Actor Bebe Neuwirth is 63. Actor Val Kilmer is 62. Singer Paul Westerberg is 62. Actor Don Diamont is 59. Rock musician Ric Ivanisevich (Oleander) is 59. Rock musician Scott Ian (Anthrax) is 58. Actor Gong Li is 56. Author Nicholas Sparks is 56. Actor Lance Reddick is 52. Pop singer Joe McIntyre is 49. Rock musician Mikko Siren (Apocalyptica) is 46. Donald Trump Jr. is 44. Rapper PSY (Park Jae-sang) is 44. Rock musician Bob Bryar is 42. Rock musician Jason Sechrist (Portugal. The Man) is 42. Actor Ricky Whittle is 42. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is 42. Actor/singer Erich Bergen is 36. DJ/vocalist Drew Taggart (The Chainsmokers) is 32. U.S. Olympic beach volleyball gold medalist Alix Klineman is 32. U.S. Olympic gold medal gymnast Gabby Douglas is 26.

Related articles

Today in history (Dec. 30)

Today in history (Dec. 29)

Freezing rain and snow could create slippery holiday travel

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – The Missouri Department of Transportation urges travelers to use extreme caution while traveling during the weekend storm.

Periods of sleet, freezing rain and snow throughout the state beginning late Friday and ending early Sunday could create slippery road conditions.

MoDOT advises people attending holiday parties on New Year’s Eve to consider staying at your party destination.

Consult weather forecasts in your area and along the route to your destination before driving.

To find out more and track the incoming storm, click here to visit Doug Heady’s New Year’s Eve weather blog.

slight glazing of ice on the pavement could impact travel, especially on elevated surfaces like bridges and overpasses, according to MoDOT.

Schmitt: Doctor in child sex abuse case should stay in jail

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — The Missouri Attorney General’s office says a doctor accused of child sex crimes should stay in jail in Arkansas because he has COVID-19.

Attorney General Eric Schmitt said in a court document filed Thursday that David Smock, of Stockton, should not be released on bond. Smock was arrested Tuesday in Harrison, Arkansas, and remains in jail there.

His attorneys have asked that he be given bond or released on his own recognizance.

Smock is charged with a total of 11 felony counts of child sex crimes in Cedar and Greene counties. He is the longtime physician for Agape Boarding School, a Christian school in southwest Missouri.

Related articles

Missouri school doctor arrested in Arkansas on abuse counts

Missouri boarding school doctor accused of child sex crimes

Betty White, TV’s Golden Girl and America’s sweetheart, has died. She was 99 years old.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Betty White, whose saucy, up-for-anything charm made her a television mainstay for more than 60 years, whether as a man-crazy TV hostess on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” or the loopy housemate on “The Golden Girls,” has died. She was 99.

People and the Washington Post reported White’s death.

She launched her TV career in daytime talk shows when the medium was still in its infancy and endured well into the age of cable and streaming. Her combination of sweetness and edginess gave life to a roster of quirky characters in shows from the sitcom “Life With Elizabeth” in the early 1950s to oddball Rose Nylund in “The Golden Girls” in the ’80s to “Boston Legal,” which ran from 2004 to 2008.

But it was in 2010 that White’s stardom erupted as never before.

In a Snickers commercial that premiered during that year’s Super Bowl telecast, she impersonated an energy-sapped dude getting tackled during a backlot football game.

“Mike, you’re playing like Betty White out there,” jeered one of his chums. White, flat on the ground and covered in mud, fired back, “That’s not what your girlfriend said!”

The instantly-viral video helped spark a Facebook campaign called “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!,” whose half-million fans led to her co-hosting “Saturday Night Live” in a much-watched, watch-hailed edition that Mother’s Day weekend. The appearance won her a seventh Emmy award.

A month later, cable’s TV Land premiered “Hot In Cleveland,” the network’s first original scripted series, which starred Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick as three past-their-prime show-biz veterans who move to Cleveland to escape the youth obsession of Hollywood. They move into a home being looked after by an elderly Polish widow — a character, played by White, who was meant to appear only in the pilot episode.

But White stole the show, and the salty Elka Ostrovsky became a key part of the series, an immediate hit. She was voted the Entertainer of the Year by members of The Associated Press.

“It’s ridiculous,” White said of the honor. “They haven’t caught on to me, and I hope they never do.”

By then, White had not only become the hippest star around, but also a role model for how to grow old joyously.

“Don’t try to be young,” she told The AP. “Just open your mind. Stay interested in stuff. There are so many things I won’t live long enough to find out about, but I’m still curious about them.”

Such was her popularity that even White’s birthday became a national event: In January 2012, NBC aired “Betty White’s 90th Birthday Party” as a star-studded prime-time special. She would later appear in such series as “Bones” and Fireside Chat With Esther” and in 2019 gave voice to one of the toys, “Bitey White,” in “Toy Story 4.”

White remained youthful in part through her skill at playing bawdy or naughty while radiating niceness. The horror spoof “Lake Placid” and the comedy “The Proposal” were marked by her characters’ surprisingly salty language. And her character Catherine Piper killed a man with a skillet on “Boston Legal.”

But she almost wasn’t cast as “Happy Homemaker” Sue Ann Nivens in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in 1973. She and her husband, Allen Ludden, were close friends of Moore and Moore’s then-husband, producer Grant Tinker. It was feared that if White failed on the show, which already was a huge hit, it would be embarrassing for all four. But CBS casting head Ethel Winant declared White the logical choice. Originally planned as a one-shot appearance, the role of Sue Ann (which humorously foreshadowed Martha Stewart) lasted until Moore ended the series in 1977.

“While she’s icky-sweet on her cooking show, Sue is really a piranha type,” White once said. The role brought her two Emmys as supporting actress in a comedy series.

In 1985, White starred on NBC with Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty in “The Golden Girls.” Its cast of mature actresses, playing single women in Miami retirement, presented a gamble in a youth-conscious industry. But it proved a solid hit and lasted until 1992.

White played Rose, a gentle, dim widow who managed to misinterpret most situations. She drove her roommates crazy with off-the-wall tales of childhood in fictional St. Olaf, Minnesota, an off-kilter version of Lake Wobegon.

The role won her another Emmy, and she reprised it in a short-lived spinoff, “The Golden Palace.”

After her co-star Arthur died in 2009, White told Entertainment Tonight: “She showed me how to be very brave in playing comedy. I’ll miss that courage.”

White’s other TV series included “Mama’s Family,” as Vicki Lawrence’s irascible mother; “Just Men,” a game show in which women tried to predict answers to questions directed to male celebrities; and “Ladies Man,” as the catty mother of Alfred Molina.

“Just Men” brought her a daytime Emmy, while she won a fourth prime time Emmy in 1996 for a guest shot on “The John Larroquette Show.”

She also appeared in numerous miniseries and TV movies and made her film debut as a female U.S. senator in Otto Preminger’s 1962 Capitol Hill drama “Advise and Consent.”

White began her television career as $50-a-week sidekick to a local Los Angeles TV personality in 1949. She was hired for a local daytime show starring Al Jarvis, the best-known disc jockey in Los Angeles.

It was then she got a tip to start lying about her age.

“We are so age-conscious in this country,” she said in a 2011 interview with The Associated Press. “It’s silly, but that’s the way we are. So I was told, ‘Knock four years off right now. You’ll be blessing yourself down the road.’

“I was born in 1922. So I thought, ‘I must always remember that I was born in 1926.’ But then I would have to do the math. Finally, I decided to heck with it.”

White proved to be a natural for the new medium. She was bright, pretty and likable, with a dimpled, eye-crinkling smile. A 1951 Los Angeles Times headline said: “Betty White Hailed as TV’s Busiest Gal.”

“I did that show 5½ hours a day, six days a week, for 4½ years,” she recalled in 1975. Jarvis was replaced by actor Eddie Albert, and when he went to Europe for the film “Roman Holiday,” she headed the show.

A sketch she had done with Jarvis turned into a syndicated series, “Life With Elizabeth,” which won her first Emmy. For a time she did interviews on “The Betty White Show” in the daytime, filmed the series at night and often turned up on a late-night talk show. She also appeared on commercials and every New Year’s narrated the Pasadena Rose Parade.

With the glib tongue and quick responses nurtured in the Jarvis years, she was a welcome guest on “I’ve Got a Secret,” “To Tell the Truth,” “What’s My Line” and other game shows — all the way up to the 2008 “Million Dollar Password,” which revived the game once hosted by Ludden, whom she had met when a contestant on his original “Password.”

That was in 1961, and the next year, while touring in summer theater during television’s off season, she starred with Ludden — by then a widower with three children — in the comedy “Critic’s Choice.”

White, who had claimed to be “militantly single” since a 1947-1949 marriage, weakened in her resolve.

“I had always said on `The Tonight Show’ and everywhere else that I would never get married again,” she told a reporter in 1963. “But Allen outnumbered me. He started in and even the children got in the act. And I surrendered — willingly.”

The marriage lasted from 1963 until his death from cancer in 1981.

Off-screen, White tirelessly raised money for animal causes such as the Morris Animal Foundation and the Los Angeles Zoo. In 1970-1971, she wrote, produced and hosted a syndicated TV show, “The Pet Set,” to which celebrities brought their dogs and cats. She wrote a 1983 book titled “Betty White’s Pet Love: How Pets Take Care of Us,” and, in 2011, published “Betty & Friends: My Life at the Zoo.”

Her devotion to pets was such that she declined a plum role in the hit 1997 movie “As Good As It Gets.” She objected to a scene in which Jack Nicholson drops a small dog down a laundry chute.

In her 2011 book “If You Ask Me (And Of Course You Won’t),” White explained the origins of her love for dogs. During the Depression, her dad made radios to sell to make extra money. But since few people had money to buy the radios, he willingly traded them for dogs, which, housed in kennels in the backyard, at times numbered as many as 15 and made White’s happy childhood even happier.

Are there any critters she doesn’t like?

“No,” White told the AP. “Anything with a leg on each corner.”

Then what about snakes?

“Ohhh, I LOVE snakes!”

She was born Betty Marion White in Oak Park, Illinois, and the family moved to Los Angeles when she was a toddler.

“I’m an only child, and I had a mother and dad who never drew a straight line: They just thought funny,” she told The Associated Press in 2015. “We’d sit around the breakfast table and then we’d start kicking it around. My dad was a salesman and he would come home with jokes. He’d say, `Sweetheart, you can take THAT one to school. But I wouldn’t take THIS one.′ We had such a wonderful time.”

Her early ambition was to be a writer, and she wrote her grammar school graduation play, giving herself the leading role.

At Beverly Hills High School, her ambition turned to acting, and she appeared in several school plays. Her parents hoped she’d go to college, but instead she took roles in a small theater and played bit parts in radio dramas.

Explaining in 2011 how she kept up her frantic pace even as an octogenarian, she explained that she only needed four hours of sleep each night.

And when asked how she had managed to be universally beloved during her decades-spanning career, she summed up with a dimpled smile: “I just make it my business to get along with people so I can have fun. It’s that simple.”

___

Associated Press writers Lynn Elber and Bob Thomas contributed.

Tulsa Police officers and their QuikTrip rescue pups make television debut; Pups were abandoned on Christmas Day, four officers adopted four pups

TULSA, Okla. — Thursday morning the four Tulsa Police officers who adopted abandoned puppies on Christmas Day appeared on the national television program, Fox and Friends, along with their respective rescue pups. 

Thursday morning the four Tulsa Police officers who adopted abandoned puppies on Christmas Day appeared on the national television program, Fox and Friends, along with their respective rescue pups. Screenshot via Tulsa Police Dept.

Tulsa Police remind everyone of the National headline story, “On Christmas Day, we received a call about 5 puppies left in a zipped duffel bag on a QT countertop. 4 of our officers adopted a dog, and the QT clerk took one as well.”

Tulsa Police reminded everyone when the impromptu adoption event occurred five days ago, ‘Adopt, Don’t Shop’. 

“The pups are now growing fast and doing great!” TPD state in a release of information. “Officer Cordova, Officer Pashley, Officer Perry and Officer Johns each brought their pups out early this morning for their national TV debut!”

The names of the pups are not made public at this time but we will continue following this story. 

“We’re so glad the pups have found a good home, and we can’t wait to watch them grow up!” Tulsa Police state. 

INSPIRING CHRISTMAS NIGHT ADOPTION.

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