Friday night lights (and rules)

So it’s Friday and we have a couple of items related to high school football events.

Going into effect this week in Madison County is a rule that students in grades 9 through 12 have to show valid student ID or a driver license and a game ticket to get in. That’s because they don’t want high school students showing up to games at which their schools are not involved, reports AL.com’s William Thornton.

Also, younger students must be accompanied by adults, and they’re going to crack down on large bags and backpacks and loitering in walkways and other areas.

The changes are a response to a flash-mob incident that caused a delay of the Hazel Green-Sparkman ballgame earlier this season.

Also, Tuscaloosa County had to forfeit last week’s win against Bessemer City because some players had been rewarded for their Week 1 performances with gift cards to Buffalo Wild Wings, reports AL.com’s Ben Thomas.

Coach Adam Winegarden said the Alabama High School Athletic Association claimed that compromised the players’ amateur status.

Defending the homeland

Thirty six percent of Boeing’s work on a new missile-defense system will be done in Huntsville, reports AL.com’s Lee Roop.

Boeing won the $70.5 million defense contract for the “Glide Breaker” program to build a system that can bring down missiles that fly at least five times the speed of sound in the upper atmosphere.

Boeing will be working on dynamics analysis, wind tunnel-testing and evaluations during test flights.

The company is the prime contractor of the ground-based midcourse defense system that protects America from long-range missile attacks.

Picture that

The aging, deteriorating roadside Saturn 1B rocket at the Alabama welcome center on Interstate 65 near the Tennessee line is now being taken apart, reports AL.com’s Paul Gattis.

The Saturn 1B, from NASA’s Apollo program, was erected at the welcome center circa 1979. Early this year NASA and the U.S. Space & Rocket Center said the rocket had deteriorated to the point it needed to come down. That was followed by calls to save the popular landmark and then determinations that restorations would be really expensive and not guaranteed to actually work.

The legislature has passed a law for the state to replace the rocket with a replica.

Wheel of Fortune success

You might remember during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Childersburg principal Quentin J. Lee went viral doing viral safety in a parody of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.”

Since then, Lee has become the superintendent of Talladega City Schools and on Monday won $15,000 in cash and prizes on “Wheel of Fortune,” reports AL.com’s Mary Colurso.

You Wheel Watchers might already know that Lee joins others from Alabama who’ve won money on the show this year such as Tomia Gordon of Alabama A&M and Lydia Patterson of Auburn University.

By the numbers

$1.5 billion

That’s now the size of the market for Alabama’s lake homes and lots, reports AL.com’s William Thornton. Alabama is ninth in the nation with 3,913 homes and lots on the market. It’s still considered a seller’s market, although inventory continues to rise.

According to Lake Homes Realty CEO Glenn Phillips, “Many sellers are overpricing themselves out of the market, and their homes sit and sit, helping inventory numbers grow.”

More Alabama news

On this date

• In 1963, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church by four members of the Ku Klux Klan took the lives of four girls — Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson.
• In 1911, Luther Terry of Red Level, who served as the U.S. surgeon general in the early 1960s, was born.

On the calendar

Today: National POW/MIA Recognition Day

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