Is privatizing the dog pound a good idea?

The youngest of our kids has had a summer vacation a month longer than all his peers. Which led him to utter a sentence the other day that I haven’t heard in 15 years: “I’m bored.”

Mitt Romney announced recently that he isn’t going to run for office again, saying he’d be too old by the end of his next term to serve effectively.

We’ve been to two weddings in the past month, with a couple more on deck. We’re into that phase, where our kids’ friends, and the friends of our kids, are getting hitched. None of ours yet, but that day is presumably coming.

On the last day of March this year, as has been our custom, my wife and I found ourselves in Kauffman Stadium for the Kansas City Royals opening day, or Opening Day, depending on the temperature of your passion.

You know what I was struck by in the city government’s discussion this week about downtown Manhattan? I was struck by how small the problems seemed.

Thinking a little bit more about K-State’s goal of hitting 30,000 students by 2030. It’s a Herculean task. Just to get your head around it, it’s about like what Bill Snyder did in football.

A neighbor kid came by earlier this week, along with his buddy and his buddy’s little sister. They were selling dog-poop-scooping services, and, well, I signed up.

As we get further from Sept. 11, I become more convinced that we were wrong about one thing in the aftermath.

K-State has announced its big new plan, what I’ll call 30-by-30. They’re calling it Next-Gen, which is lame, but I presume they’ll win and I’ll have to call it that, too. Not yet.

Went to a wedding in Chicago last weekend, a chance to take a breath before a busy fall.

I’m not in a position to recommend specific budget cuts, so I can’t be too strident about this. But there’s simply something amiss when the tax bill of the average homeowner is likely to increase by more than 10 percent.

It’s a positive sign that Katie Allen says she plans to resign as chair of the Democratic Party in Riley County.

It was National Lampoon’s “Vacation” that did it for me.

We’ve had a heckuva struggle this year with the local government over our reporting on their budgets. That’s essentially because they’re going to raise your tax bill by north of 10 percent, and they don’t like us reporting it that way. They prefer that we report that they’re lowering the tax…

Perhaps you saw the video of the fight that broke out at a K-State fraternity pledge basketball game last weekend. It’s gotten a lot of attention online.

Small-world moment from the tennis universe, with which I am inordinately familiar. It all gets back to Manhattan, Kansas, as nearly every story can if you look hard enough.

Substantial changes are coming soon to The Mercury. They’re probably not the changes you’d anticipate in 2023.

Tip of the editorial cap to Jerry Moran, the United States Senator who happens to call Manhattan home.

Three items to go over:

On behalf of all Manhattanites, I want to warn you newcomers. I know you dropped off your kids at college, or helped them set up their basement apartment, and it was 115 degrees outside, steamy as the rainforest. You probably broke a sweat just getting out of bed.

Where I last left off in the saga of the raid on a newspaper office an hour south of here, I was waiting to see what information the cops had that could possibly justify such an action.

It seems a bit strange that the concept of “radio and TV” would be considered historic. A heavy brass doorplate bearing those words, salvaged from the decade-plus-long remodel job of the Kansas State Capitol building in Topeka, was billed as just that.

The notion that the Country Stampede is back on the table as a potential local event is a very encouraging development.

There’s a lot I dislike about Facebook. There are a couple things I do enjoy, though, and one of them is the first day of school. I like it because people share photos of their kids, without pretension. It’s just a milepost marker, no comment other than something like: “Where’s the time gone?”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t salute Helen Roser one last time on this page. It’s the place that she’s probably best-known.

Here’s an odd twist on the disaster playing out in Marion County: I’d like to tip my hat to a prosecutor.

What happened late last week in Marion County is so hard to believe that I find myself trying to find a reason to not believe it.

Two years ago, as I was headed to Minnesota for a week of summer vacation, news started breaking that Oklahoma and Texas were leaving the Big 12. I was barraged with phone calls and texts, including from Jon Wefald. As one of the architects of the conference, it had to be a painful moment fo…

I’m not quite sure what I expected from Boy George. But I certainly didn’t expect “Sympathy for the Devil.” My expectation – and how that clashed with reality – revealed something important, I think. Stick with me.

Dear President Linton,

Three years ago, we scattered my mom’s ashes in Bay Lake, in north-central Minnesota. It’s what she wanted, and so my dad carried what was left of her down to the dock and onto the pontoon.

Things I miss:

A chapter may be closing for the Dusty Bookshelf in Aggieville, but its owner hopes the story isn’t over yet.

So now comes the big one: Donald Trump has been indicted for trying to throw out the result of an election so as to stay in power.

There’s a new bill in Congress to try to help local news publishers like us. Given that we’re the intended beneficiaries, you’re probably not shocked that I’m inclined to support it.

This is basically a 4-H appreciation column.

I can still remember recording the official warnings. As a young radio deejay, not only did I spin the Adult Contemporary hits, my duties and responsibilities included voicing and recording commercials, public service announcements and, on occasion, the official language scripted by Cold War…

I have a relatively simple way to fix Harvard admissions: They ought to help public-school kids.

The latest wiggle in the matter of Hunter Biden is likely to be unsatisfying for everybody, as is everything in the foreseeable future.

I’m desperate. Desperate enough to momentarily flirt with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

I sorta like “Try That In A Small Town,” the controversial new song from Jason Aldean. Like a lot of country these days, it’s basically arena rock, Def Leppard with a twang and a slide guitar rather than all that hair and spandex. Good guitar riff.

It’s not easy to forge a consensus in a divisive environment, but two things appear to have done it: Bud Light and the over-the-counter birth-control pill.

Interesting couple of days in Pittsburgh, where I went to attend a conference of newspaper people. This particular gathering was for folks involved in family-owned newspaper companies, a thinning herd if ever there was one.