I’ve prepping a pretty big story for you all (4,000 unedited words can’t be wrong!), and I was hoping to have it done this week, but the editing process and a flat tire set me back. So here are a few things that I found interesting that you may have missed:

Look, mosquitoes suck. Nobody likes them. They ruin any perfectly good backyard activity. You can understand why people want them gone.

You how how you can get rid of them? By just getting rid of anything that collects standing water. Old tires. Low spots in the yard. Birdbaths? Maybe? Standing water is a breeding ground for mosquito larvae. Get rid of it, and make it possible to grill outside in peace.

But who has the time to do all that? You can just, you know, pay someone to spray your yard. Better living through science!

Except when you do that, there’s a chance you’re going to create a type of super skeeter. From phys.org:

Two studies from NC State University (brought to my attention by Elizabeth Friend) looked at Wake County. The first showed that around ten years ago, most mosquitoes didn’t have a resistance to pesticides. In 2018, they found a small cluster of resistance. By 2023, they found at least some resistant mosquitoes in 84% of the blocks they sampled.

The second study found that resistance was higher in neighborhoods with higher property values. Researchers didn’t check and see whether those individual houses were using more insecticides, but they said the findings suggest that the more money you have, the more likely you are to hire someone to spray insecticide or just to do it yourself.

As always, the researchers say more research is needed.

Does this mean that spraying is universally bad? Not necessarily? It just can’t be the only thing you do to rid yourself of the scourge of mosquitoes, unless you want them to arrive in greater numbers eventually. Viva la resistance!

Being a Charlotte Bobcats fan was once an exercise in tradeoffs. If you went to a game, there was a good chance that the opposing team would rest their best players because, well, they didn’t need them to beat the Bobcats. However! You could, if you waited until a minute after tip off, convince the scalpers to sell you tickets for as cheap as $5 a seat.

However, here is proof that the players themselves did not need to be in peak form to win in Charlotte:

“We had some Bojangles before the game because they wasn’t that good,” former Miami Heat legend Dwayne Wade said on the Post Moves Show podcast.

So when did this happen? Almost certainly in 2005, when Stan Van Gundy was still the Heat coach. In February of that year, the Heat beat the Bobcats by ten, but in March, they lost by two. So let that be a lesson to athletes: Always try your best. But when you’re playing the Bobcats, it’s Bo Time.

Part of me admires the initiative it takes to, say, pay down a thousand-dollar debt in pennies, god rest their little copper and zinc souls. Could you write a check? Initiative a bank transfer? Put it on your debit card? Sure! But in order to show just how salty you are, you really have to work to round up 100,000 pennies, and deliver them to the person who’s making you pay up. Let them figure out how to transport more than a quarter-ton of currency.

I don’t know the exact circumstances of a civil case that happened in Catawba County, but as part of it, sheriff’s deputies seized this car, a 1950 Oldsmobile:

If you’d like to buy this thing, it’s being auctioned off next month.

Does it run? No! How’s the chrome looking? Mighty nice. How’s the rest of it? Never mind! How much is it worth? Depends. Project cars go for as little as $10,000, and nice ones can fetch five or six times that amount. Even though this is a 76-year-old non-working car, it’s almost certainly worth more than the other cars the deputies seized: a 2003 Toyota Celica and a 1994 Dodge Ram.