Weekly family rail, with a review of the new “Transformers” movie, tips on volunteering and more.

The man known as mayor for the last 20 years in Bastrop was honored Tuesday by his family, friends and the community.

For two years, Larry Tye pored through thousands of research pages and wrote hundreds of pages about an often-overlooked American icon: baseball great Leroy “Satchel” Paige. Satchel’s story, said Tye, is about overcoming “every obstacle any human being could ever imagine.”

Recent Bastrop High School graduate Raven S. Hollins has been named recipient of a $500 Suddenlink Communications Scholarship.

Morehouse Parish residents interested in learning more about the newest school to come to Bastrop will have an opportunity tonight at the Bastrop Visitor Center.

When consumers toss unused household chemicals and other hazardous items into the garbage, they wind up in municipal landfills, which often are not equipped to handle this kind of waste. But keeping cleaning solutions, insecticides and other items around the house has its dangers. Many household cleaning products, pest-control chemicals and lawn-care chemicals can be replaced with more natural, less toxic methods.

An unusual chance to see a close pairing of Jupiter and Neptune awaits the next clear night. Due to its magnificence, brilliant Jupiter is easy to pick out and probably most people have seen it without even knowing it. Neptune, however, although it is a giant planet as well, is so far away very few people have ever seen it. This is a chance to find Neptune with a pair of binoculars or a small telescope with little trouble, since it is close by the King of Planets, Jupiter.

With the temperature soaring higher and the cost for the use of electricity steadily increasing, low income people and some of the elderly are greatly affected by the heat.

When I was a teenager, there was a summer when I survived on Oreo cookies, Carnation Instant Breakfast and the occasional Dairy Queen Blizzard. Today, I have a teen of my own who has to fend for himself most days during the summer. Like most parents, I'm not a nutritionist, but I know better than to let him con me into filling the house with junk food. What's harder is finding easy, healthy food that he'll take the time to fix and won't be bored of after a week or two.

In the early 1980s, you couldn’t turn on MTV without seeing a Huey Lewis and the News video. That was a time when peppy pop music dominated the airwaves and when music videos actually played 24-7 on the venerable music channel.