PAPER TRAILS

A feast of sirens, flab and pizza

Dishing out heaping helpings of Thanksgiving Trails:

TURKEY: This “fowlup” involves North Little Rock’s emergency warning system. Each week the sirens are tested at noon on Wednesday.

But on Nov. 7, they sounded at — oops! — 11 a.m. instead.

“We did miss the time change,” explains city communication director Nathan Hamilton. “This year we switched to an automated test system where we’ve got new sirens; they’re state-of-theart type stuff. And the test is automatic. This is the first [time] we’re using them where there was a time change, and we hadn’t accounted for that.

“So, good. I’m glad we do the test. We figured that out.”

Or did they? Because instead of sounding at noon this past Wednesday, the sirens went off at — oops! — 10 a.m. instead.

“We thought we made the fix, but the programming, actually the software, was wrong,” Hamilton says, adding, “This is one where it wasn’t actually user error.”

Still, he says, “But we’re absolutely responsible for that; we’re taking ownership on that.”

And quickly. Hamilton says, “When I heard it going off at 10 o’clock, I immediately jumped on Facebook — I had Facebook open on my phone, writing that post before the sirens were even finished.”

His good-natured post on the city’s page: “Our bad. Yep, we messed up on the time change last week and made the one hour fix going the wrong way this week. We’ll get it right next week. On a good note … this is why we do the test, to work out the kinks!”

So the alarm is no cause for alarm.

PIE: Well, pie as in pizza. Our Kat Stromquist reported that Pizza D’Action, Stifft Station’s longtime dive bar and pizza place (really, it served food? All we ever had was beer and secondhand smoke!) will close Dec. 30.

And we hope they go out without a bang. Over the years, Pizza D’ — at the tricky intersection where West Markham Street and Kavanaugh Boulevard meet — already had way too many cars crash through its front window.

POTATOES: As in couch potatoes. WalletHub.com picks on Arkansas in yet another recent study; this time with fat-shaming. In its list of “Fattest States in the U.S.” (wallethub.com/ edu/fattest-states/16585/), Arkansas came in third after West Virginia and Mississippi.

After Thursday — pass the cornbread dressing and the giblet gravy — we should have a great shot at No. 1!

Happy Thanksgiving!