Laurels & lances: Musicals, memes, gadgets and guns

Laurel: To all the kids raising the curtains. Musical season at schools all over the area is in full swing, with cast members singing and dancing and hitting their marks while crew members build sets, prep props and focus the spotlights. Every show is as physical as a football game and has all the seamless teamwork of a marching band at halftime. If you haven’t gotten a chance to take in the stars of tomorrow while they tread the boards today, you should.

Take a bow, Broadway babies. You earned it.

Lance: To memes in the workplace. Olympia Security Group of Washington County found out that some jokes don’t belong on the business Facebook page after losing a contract. The company was set to take over as the security provider for Highlands School District until some shared images gave the board pause.

Go figure. A meme with the message “Be polite, be courteous, show professionalism and have a plan to kill everyone in the room” didn’t exactly give the district a professional vibe.

The company has the right to post whatever it wants, but when districts are trying to get kids to understand some things aren’t a laughing matter, a security provider shouldn’t need to be schooled, too. Good call, Highlands.

Laurel: To Murrysville Police for acquiring state-of-the-art equipment and not putting it on a shelf to collect dust.

Police made an arrest using a drone with an infrared camera to track two suspects who crashed a stolen car about 4 a.m. Monday on Route 22 and fled into the woods. The device was able to steer officers toward suspects within about 40 minutes, according to police reports.

The suspects, Zymire Wilson, 20, of the Springdale area, and Michael P. Lipovsik, 19, of Pittsburgh, immediately surrendered, deciding they could not outrun the drone. Chief Thomas P. Seefeld said several officers have been trained to use the drone since its purchase last year and this was the first arrest credited to its use. Kudos.

Lance: To people who can’t figure out that guns don’t go on planes. A Monroeville man tried to bring a .38-caliber pistol onto a flight Sunday. It was the sixth time someone tried to get a gun onto a plane this year.

How are people getting all the way to a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint — where you have to take off your shoes and put your laptop in a separate bin and throw away the soda you just bought 10 minutes ago — with a handgun? This happened 34 times in 2018 and 32 times in 2017.