Good morning.

Thursday in the Whippet City brings a forty-precent chance of rain today (ninety percent tonight), with a daytime high of forty-two.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM today, and Common Council at 6:30 PM.

I haven’t had a pet mouse since I was a child, but I wish I’d known then how easy it is to teach a mouse to walk backwards. In Mouse Training Secret: How To Teach A Mouse To Walk Backwards, YouTube user MouseAgility shows how to train your pet mouse to walk in reverse:

MouseAgility, by the way, has over fifty videos of mouse-training tips.

On April 3, 1860, it’s the debut of the Pony Express:

On this day in 1860, the first Pony Express mail, traveling by horse and rider relay teams, simultaneously leaves St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. Ten days later, on April 13, the westbound rider and mail packet completed the approximately 1,800-mile journey and arrived in Sacramento, beating the eastbound packet’s arrival in St. Joseph by two days and setting a new standard for speedy mail delivery. Although ultimately short-lived and unprofitable, the Pony Express captivated America’s imagination and helped win federal aid for a more economical overland postal system. It also contributed to the economy of the towns on its route and served the mail-service needs of the American West in the days before the telegraph or an efficient transcontinental railroad.

On this day in 1865, Wisconsinites help take Richmond for the Union:

1865 – (Civil War) Confederate capital seized
When Petersburg, Virginia, fell on the night of April 2, 1865, Confederate leaders hastily abandoned Richmond. The 5th, 6th, 7th, 19th, 36th, 37th and 38th Wisconsin Infantry participated in the occupation of Petersburg and Richmond. The brigade containing the 19th Wisconsin Infantry was the first to enter Richmond on the morning of April 3rd. Their regimental flag became the first to fly over the captured capital of the Confederacy when Colonel Samuel Vaughn planted it on Richmond City Hall.

Here’s Thursday’s game from Breaking Bad’s Puzzability series:

This Week’s Game — March 31-April 4

Breaking Bad

You’ll be gathering a rogues’ gallery this week. For each day, we’ll give you a series of clues, each of which leads to a word. You must drop one letter out of each of these answer words and put them together (in order), adding spaces as needed, to get the name of a well-known movie villain.

Example:

Regular / pen point / starts a poker pot

Answer:

Norman Bates (normal / nib / antes)

What to Submit:

Submit the character name and the smaller words (as “Norman Bates (normal / nib / antes)” in the example) for your answer.

Thursday, April 3

Your poker cards / playful bite / “Swan Lake,” for one / provide the food, as at a wedding

Good morning.

We’ll have an increasingly cloudy day with a high of forty-seven.

At 3 PM, there will be a municipal meeting to discuss a marketing program for the City of Whitewater.

At 6:30 PM, there will be a Police & Fire commission meeting.

On this day in 1865, Gen. Grant achieves a Union victory, one in a string that rapidly take the war to its end:

After a ten-month siege, Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant capture the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, and Confederate General Robert E. Lee leads his troops on a desperate retreat westward.

The ragged Confederate troops could no longer maintain the 40-mile network of defenses that ran from southwest of Petersburg to north of Richmond, the Rebel capital 25 miles north of Petersburg. Through the winter, desertion and attrition melted Lee’s army down to less than 60,000, while Grant’s army swelled to over 120,000. Grant attacked Five Forks southwest of Petersburg on April 1, scoring a huge victory that cut Lee’s supply line and inflicted 5,000 casualties. The next day, Lee wrote to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, “I think it absolutely necessary that we should abandon our position tonight…”

We’re mid-week in Puzzability’s Breaking Bad series – here’s Wednesday’s game:

This Week’s Game — March 31-April 4

Breaking Bad

You’ll be gathering a rogues’ gallery this week. For each day, we’ll give you a series of clues, each of which leads to a word. You must drop one letter out of each of these answer words and put them together (in order), adding spaces as needed, to get the name of a well-known movie villain.

Example:

Regular / pen point / starts a poker pot

Answer:

Norman Bates (normal / nib / antes)

What to Submit:

Submit the character name and the smaller words (as “Norman Bates (normal / nib / antes)” in the example) for your answer.

Wednesday, April 2

Pecan, for one / choir member’s platform / performed surveillance on

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be windy, but increasingly sunny, with a high of forty-six.

Whitewater’s Fire and Rescue Task Force meets this evening at 6:30 PM.

Google’s announced, this April 1st morning, an upgrade to their mapping application to find the greatest Pokémon master through Google Maps for Android or iPhone. This may be the among the most competitive job searches of the early twenty-first century.

It’s the founding-day anniversary for Milwaukee’s major-league baseball team:

1970 – Milwaukee Brewers Founded
On this date the Milwaukee Brewers, Inc., an organization formed by Allan H. “Bud” Selig and Edmund Fitzgerald, acquired the Seattle Pilots franchise. The team was renamed the Milwaukee Brewers, a tribute to the city’s long association with brewing industry. {Source: Brewers’ History Page.]

Puzzability‘s Breaking Bad series continues with Tuesday’s game:

This Week’s Game — March 31-April 4

Breaking Bad

You’ll be gathering a rogues’ gallery this week. For each day, we’ll give you a series of clues, each of which leads to a word. You must drop one letter out of each of these answer words and put them together (in order), adding spaces as needed, to get the name of a well-known movie villain.

Example:

Regular / pen point / starts a poker pot

Answer:

Norman Bates (normal / nib / antes)

What to Submit:

Submit the character name and the smaller words (as “Norman Bates (normal / nib / antes)” in the example) for your answer.

Tuesday, April 1

Blend, as in a recipe / online conversation / ship’s wheel / decade components