This is a sad little story:

Lamar Phillips, the owner of Goal Post Bar-B-Q in Anniston, on Friday closed the doors to his restaurant for the final time.

He said he will sell the business, a fixture of Quintard Avenue since the 1960s, but declined to provide the potential buyer’s name or that person’s intentions for the building.

That Anniston restaurant has some of the best neon around:

I took that picture on Valentine’s Day in 2007. We had dinner that night at a catfish joint. Had I been thinking we would have gone to Goal Post. Catfish was not the best Valentine’s dinner. (Because barbecue is the ideal, of course. And it would have run me $12, apparently.) But we sat right down at the catfish joint, if I recall. Anyway, it was being in the same place that mattered. That year The Yankee was in Atlanta and we spent a lot of time on I-20 going back and forth.

Certain stretches of that road bring it all back.

Anyway, Goal Post was great. The neon is the best in that part of the state. The kicker actually puts the ball through the uprights. You can just see the other parts of the neon fading into the darkness. It looks great in motion. And that kicker has never missed.

Hope they are doing business there again soon.

I hope those American tourists can figure out a way around this barricade at the World War I memorial. I’m more troubled by the presumption that someone would tell you where you may practice your rights.

But the doings at the World War II memorial, just down the mall, are of course getting a lot of attention:

Greatest Generation “@SykesCharlie: Best WWII Memorial Sign: "NORMANDY WAS CLOSED WHEN WE GOT THERE, TOO."”

— Lesley (@Currahee88) October 2, 2013

Some of it is disproportionate:

“@samsteinhp: I'm sure WIC recipients would welcome 1/1000th the attention being given to the WWII memorial today” So storm Normandy.

— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) October 2, 2013

All of this is needless, of course.

The first time I visited the World War II memorial, it was about midnight on a cold December Saturday. It was open, as it was designed to stay open.

The memorial has 4,048 gold stars, each representing 100 Americans who died in the war. “Closing” open memorials with the simple intention of inconveniencing people is, well, simple. But you’ve learned to not expect a lot of nuance out of Washington D.C. these days.

In front of the wall of stars there is the message “Here we mark the price of freedom.”

Here’s a story with a great pull quote: “(W)hen he called the parks service, he was told they would face arrest. ‘I said, are you kidding me? You’re going to arrest a 90/91-year-old veteran from seeing his memorial? If it wasn’t for them it wouldn’t be there. She said, ‘That’s correct sir.””

But a bit of sanity finally prevailed.

It is shameful to make sacred places props, both the closing it and the photo opportunity it turned into for some congress members, but there’s not a great supply of shame in Washington.

And, think, we’re just getting started. We’re going about all of this all wrong, on both sides.

Things to read that I found interesting today …

Speaking of the shutdown, please meet The Most Unessential Man in America, in what is surely a bitterly humorous and demoralizing tale.

Here’s The Onion on the shutdown.

Local reads:

Study: Alabama residents pay 14 percent more for homeowner’s insurance after making 1 claim

4 found shot to death inside vehicle in remote area of Winston Co.

This one is interesting. How Big The Internet Of Things Could Become:

By the end of the decade, a nearly nine-fold increase in the volume of devices on the Internet of Things will mean a lot of infrastructure investment and market opportunities will available in this sector.

[…]

Who wins if any of these scenarios takes place? Semiconductor, network, remote sensor and big data vendors will be the lottery winners of such Internet of Things growth, to name a very few. Big data especially: 75 billion devices all generating signals of data to be analyzed and measured, many of which in real- or near-realtime? That’s got big data written all over it.

Designers and engineers look for opportunities in problems. In something that massively big maybe the idea is to look for the problem. My bet is on networking the data — which is challenging in volume — and predictive algorithms.

Now, what would you do with that, if you knew what to do with that?

Sticking to the newsroom, then, there was an afternoon of grading things. And then, in the early evening, we critiqued the Crimson. High story count, but it needs better art, not their best design. As always there were a few critical copy editing points. A solid effort, but, perhaps, not the one of which we are capable.

That’s what the next issue is for, of course. Check out the what the hardworking students at the Crimson are doing, here.

On the drive home I spent a lot of time thinking about the run I was going to do. What? This is supposed to be a rest day, anyway, and I’m thinking about running? As in, I found myself looking forward to it.

I do not know what is happening.

So I ran through the neighborhood in the darkness. Only two stretches of which don’t have good light. One of those, of course, being the short bridge over the creek at the bottom of the neighborhood. There’s a light at the far end and a light down a way from the other side. And, right in the middle of the two sits the bridge. Between having no oxygen in your brain and no light for your eyes it looked like there were goblins and monsters on the bridge.

Greeeeat.

May there be no trolls on your footpaths!