Almost old enough to vote

 My blog is 17 years old!

I think that's old for a blog.

Small things 30 July

• Poorly explain what you do for a living: Assist people who don't know how to Google
• From now on, every time you look at Tesla's logo, you'll see a cat's nose.
• Apparently there is no reason to make athletes wear revealing outfits to play a sport well.
• Any time minimum wage comes up, 60% of America is like, "But - what about McDonald's profit margins?"
• I wouldn't want to live on planet 'gummy'. Their worms are bigger than their bears!
• We found watermelon, but what about airmelon, firemelon, and earthmelon? We need all the elemelons.
• Garlic is an anticoagulant. Eating garlic to ward off vampires is likely propaganda by vampires to make humans bleed more efficiently. That or Italian vampires started the rumour to get humans to season themselves properly.
• Roses are red, violets are VIOLET!

Dad 1 (sees Dad 2 coming): "Oh no! Here comes trouble!"

Dad 2: "Oh boy, they let you out of the house?"

Dad 1 & Dad 2: [laugh hysterically]

Rare photo

 

Ozzy Osbourne teaching John Lennon how to write heavy metal music, circa 1968

56 years of performing and counting

NPR's Tiny Desk concerts continued even through the pandemic, they just moved into the intimate venue of the artist's choice.

Tom Jones anyone? Seriously. 81 and still crooning.

Come for the mojitos, stay for the dancing sandwiches

 

The same concept expressed two different ways

Give $600 to a poor person and it's gone in a week.

Give $600 to a rich person and it's multiplied 10x in a few years.

Versus

Give $600 to someone with no money and they have no choice but to use it to survive.

Give $600 to someone whose needs are already fully met and they can sit on it all they want.

Things I learned lately 30 July

• Despite its widespread use in the plots of TV shows and movies alike, a chloroform soaked rag is a terrible way to render someone unconscious as it takes around five straight minutes of breathing chloroform in via a rag to knock someone out—not the mere seconds portrayed in TV shows and movies.
• Polar bears are so incredibly good at retaining heat energy that they’re practically invisible when photographed with infrared film. The only heat signature they have is the puff of warm breath leaving their mouths.
• Canola oil is a contraction of Canada and “ola” (meaning oil, low acid). The plant it is extracted from was developed in Canada and is one of their most profitable crops.
  
  
  
• Toto's 1982 smash "Africa" has finally reached its logical conclusion with a multimedia artist's new sound installation, which plays the song on loop deep in the coastal Namib desert. Namibian-German artist Max Siedentopf installed 6 speakers placed atop individual plinths and attached to an MP3 player that contains only the song. The art piece is powered by solar energy with the promise that it will run "for all eternity."
• In 1928, at age 16, Elizabeth "Betty" Robinson Schwartz became the first woman ever awarded an Olympic gold medal for track and field. In 1931, she was in a plane crash and mistakenly identified as dead. She was placed in the trunk of a car and driven to the morgue where it was discovered that she was in a coma, but alive. It took her years to walk normally again. She couldn't kneel for a typical 100m run, so she joined the US relay team and won gold with them in 1936. Badass. 
• 11 years ago, Microsoft held a mock funeral for the iPhone on its introduction of the Windows phone. That aged well.
• Jimmy Carter is the longest-lived president, the longest-retired president, the first president to live forty years after their inauguration, and the first to reach the age of 95.
• The east end of Bowness Road in YYC starts at 37th Street NW because at one time, Calgary's city limits were at 37th Street. 
• Calgary's neighbourhood south of downtown called 'The Beltline' is named after a streetcar route #5 that ran like a conveyor belt in a loop.
• There's a Refugee Olympic team!

You got it

 

"Can you change the sign please?"

 

KFC's new motto may as well be what rhymes with this word

Small things 23 July

• If someone lets you merge, give them a wave of thanks. Just because.
• I truly don't understand why conservatives don't like cancel culture. They actually started it. EI fraud? Cancel EI. Welfare fraud? Cancel welfare. CERB fraud? Cancel CERB. Public health care insurance fraud? Cancel public health care insurance. Union fraud? Cancel unions.
• I'm guessing the highest ration of killing birds with one stone would have been the one that created the Chicxulub crater.
• Macaulay Culkin is about to turn 41. Do you feel old?
• When you're young, you get praised and rewarded for eating everything on your plate. As an adult, you might get ridiculed.
• When you ask your spouse if they want anything from the store and they say 'no', you still don't come home empty-handed.
• Jokes about communism are not funny unless everyone gets them.
• New slogan for the Calgary Folk Festival: "Let's get folked up!" Discuss.

♫When the moon hits your eye

And there's fur on your thighs

You're a werewolf

When you burst out your jeans

And then eat human beings

You're a werewolf

Stop screaming

 

The latest phish stink

Another example of why cybersecurity awareness is so important.

A new phishing campaign has a clever way to get around the standard security measures built into a Windows and Office computer system. Naturally, it requires human cooperation to enable the payload.

Allow me to make my opening statement. Never open an attachment or click a hyperlink in an unexpected email, even from someone you know. Let us proceed.

The malware arrives through a phishing email containing a Microsoft Word document as an attachment. When the document is opened and macros are enabled, the Word document, in turn, with no involvement from the user, downloads and opens a password-protected Microsoft Excel document.

After downloading the XLS file, the Word VBA reads the cell contents from the XLS file and creates a new macro for the same XLS file. Then it writes the cell contents to XLS VBA macros as functions. Once the macros are written and ready, the Word document edits the registry and changes the policy to Disable Excel Macro Warning and invokes the malicious macro function from the Excel file. Again, the user is oblivious to this. The Excel file now runs the macro which downloads the Zloader payload. The Zloader payload is then executed using the rundll32 executable.

Importantly, the user still has to enable macros when prompted in the first document, for the second document to be downloaded. Due to security concerns, macros are disabled by default in Microsoft Office applications. As a result, the infection chain can be thwarted if users are trained to never enable macros in an Office document.

More importantly, go back and re-read my first piece of advice. Never open an attachment or click a hyperlink in an unexpected email, even from someone you know.

That is all.

Gift card terms and conditions

When the terms of a gift card are long (there's as much on the other side) 

Things I learned lately 23 July

• According to the High Speed Rail Alliance, the record for the world's fastest operational train is held by the French TGV at 357.2 mph (574.8 km/h).
  
  
  
• The cardboard beds in the Olympic athlete's village in Japan are designed not to be able to withstand the weight of 2 people, especially 2 people in motion. No jumping either...
• The same woman (Perri Lister) who sang backup vocals on Billy Idol's 'Eyes without a face' (1984) also sang the French backing vocals on 'Fade to Grey' from Visage (1981).
• The "X" in "Xmas" has nothing to do with "taking the Christ out of Christmas." In fact, it literally means "Christ." In Greek, "the word Christos (Christ) begins with the letter 'X,' or chi." The abbreviation isn't a modern or secular invention; it's been around since 1021 as "XPmas," later further shortened to "Xmas."
• Google is opening its first physical retail store in NYC.
• Kraft has partnered with ice-cream maker Van Leeuwen and the partnership has produced a rather interesting ice cream flavor: macaroni and cheese.
• Although Wayne's World (1992) was released after Freddie Mercury died, he got to see the car headbanging scene featuring Bohemian Rhapsody shortly before he passed away on November 24, 1991. He loved it and foresaw how the use of the song would ignite a comeback for Queen in the United States.
• In 2009 Icelandic engineers accidentally drilled into a magma chamber with temperatures up to 1000C (1832F). Instead of abandoning the well like a previous project in Hawaii, they decided to pump water down and became the most powerful geothermal well ever created.
• Microsoft is bidding farewell to the Internet Explorer web browser. In 2022.
• The greater Tokyo area has a population of 37,468,000 (2018). Canada's population is 38,048,738 (2021).

Small things 16 July

• You'll only get lost in thought if it's unfamiliar territory.
• Do astronauts call shotgun?
• I have gone 22 years without a cigarette.
• Make a pact with your significant other that whenever they call you, you're going to answer with "I told you never to call me at this number!" so that the people around you can let their imaginations run wild.
  
  
  
• If you're working from home now and your spouse comes into the room, just say "How did you get past security?"
• Betty White is so old, she starred on a 7-season TV show about being old that went off the air before many of you were born.
• I have trouble understanding why school curriculum has to be political. Why do governments feel it necessary to interfere with how children are taught? Do children have choices for their education? Yes they do. Do politicians have advanced education degrees? Do they listen to those who are qualified and operate in the existing system? Do they decide what gets taught in university or college? The answers to all of these questions is 'no'. So why are they involved?
• Is the point of life to gather guests to attend your funeral?
• Become an Uber eats driver. Order food from Uber Eats. Accept your own order. Then get paid to pick up your own food.
• Consider a plate of food. Do you eat the least favourite thing first, favourite thing first, or eat everything equally?
• Imagine the first time someone heard a parrot speak.
• 25.806975801127 The root of all evil (666).

It's learning!

Here's a newer video documenting how advanced and capable Tesla's beta full self driving system has gotten.

You can see at certain points that the driver is unsure whether the car can handle the situation it finds itself in and is ready to take over the driving. But the car comes through. Every. Time.

Tesla is saying that soon, new cars in California (to start with) are going to deliver themselves to their new owners.

Amazing the leaps that this company has made in the area of driving automation. The pessimists were once saying this can't happen before 2040.

The dialog you hear in the background is a conversation between members of the Tesla team describing how their AI learning works. If you find it too distracting, just mute the audio.

Wait, what?

 

Burgs on the 'Q'

 A poem about burgers

Burgs on the 'Q'

Burgs on the 'Q'

Gotta char-broil some 

Burgs on the 'Q'

Hold the cheese

Hold the bacon

When the burgs done right

They don't need no fakin'

Let 'em sizzle

Please don't squeeze 'em

And whatever you do

Never ever freeze 'em

Don't use no filla'

Use the right kind of meat

Chuck

Sirloin 

Or bison is a treat

Burgs on the 'Q' 

Burgs on the 'Q'

The juices be drippin'

From my burgs on the 'Q'

What is this about?

Would anyone like to take a guess what this map represents?

I'll give a hint. It only has relevance in the last 15 years.

"Space it is!!"

 

Things I learned lately 16 July

• The new Aunt Jemima pancake mix boxes are out. All they did was get rid of the little picture of Aunt Jemima.
• In 1979, Chevrolet sold 282,571 Camaro sports cars. In 2020, they sold 29,775.
• Apparently, 6 days after the last US election, which Trump lost, he tried to order all US troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Germany and Africa within weeks. Needless to say, the military didn't go along with his wishes.
  
  
  
• There is no evidence to suggest that using a mobile phone while pumping gas is dangerous.
• Based on the number of car fires per one billion miles driven, ICE cars are 11 times more likely to catch fire than pure electric cars.
• Electric cars are unintuitively just as loud as ICE cars, especially on the highway. That's because even though they have no engine making noise, their weight and larger tires create louder tire noise.
• Oregon was the first west coast state to complete its portion of Interstate 5 in 1966.
• "Trees" are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees.
• Derm Assist, a web-based app developed by Google can identify skin conditions with just a photo. It will be launched starting in the EU by the end of 2021. You snap a few photos of your skin anomaly, upload the pictures to Derm Assist. Google's artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities analyze the photos and look for a match in a database of 288 skin conditions. It then presents a handful of possible skin conditions you might have with an accuracy rate of up to 97%. Derm Assist only needs three photos to match you with a few possible skin conditions, but to get more precise results, you can fill out an optional questionnaire that goes into more detail about your skin condition. Google makes it clear that this is not a diagnostic tool, but rather a way to help narrow down possible conditions so you can determine if you should see a doctor or just get something from the drugstore.
• Some folks in 5 counties in eastern Oregon and northeastern California want to join Idaho. I'll let you take a wild guess what party they support.

More of a tribute than a cover

Let me introduce you to Scary Pockets. They like covering other songs. Funking them up a little.

And I really think they outdid themselves this time, covering Everybody Wants to Rule the World. 

With a little help from the amazing Cory Henry too.

Ectomy

 

"Goin' to California with an achin' in my heart"

Really nice cover of Going to California by Kyle McKearney.

Filmed in Calgary!

Small things 9 July

• Idea for a show: Wilderness survival, but instead of wilderness it's living on minimum wage and the contestants are all billionaires.
• What were electric eels called before electricity was discovered?
• Remember when you'd take a whole roll of pictures on a film camera and have to wait a week for them to get developed only to find out that they were mostly crap? 
  
  
  
• Remember when we used to try to tape songs that were playing on the radio to get them for free and get really annoyed when the DJ would keep talking over the beginning or end of the song? Anyone?
• I saw a thing on FB that said "You're offered $3 billion but you can never consume alcohol again. Can you do it?" All I could think was "Are there really people who would say 'no' to this question?"
• I walked into a colleague's office and on his desk was a copy of 'Weld' magazine. It struck me as funny. There's a joke in there struggling to get out.
• TIL some people spread jam on their bread with a spoon.
• They're going to title the next Fast & Furious film "Fast10 your seatbelts." Right? Right?
• billie eilish, carly rae jepsen and miley cyrus should form a pop group called billie rae cyrus.
• Just think, before caller ID, people used to pick up the phone and have to deal with whoever was on the call.
• What if they do free Britney Spears and she immediately releases a ska album? What then?

Songs that are 40 years old this year (2021)

Kim Carnes - Bette Davis Eyes 

Diana Ross & Lionel Richie - Endless Love

Kenny Rogers - Lady

John Lennon - (Just Like) Starting Over

Rick Springfield - Jessie's Girl

Kool & the Gang - Celebration

Hall & Oates - Kiss on My List / You Make My Dreams

Eddie Rabbitt - I Love a Rainy Night

Dolly Parton - 9 to 5

REO Speedwagon - Keep on Loving You / Take It on the Run

Sheena Easton - Morning Train (Nine to Five)

Blondie - Rapture / The Tide Is High

Grover Washington, Jr. & Bill Withers - Just the Two of Us

The Pointer Sisters - Slow Hand

John Lennon - Woman

Stars on 45 - Stars on 45 Medley

Neil Diamond - Love on the Rocks / Hello Again

Gino Vannelli - Living Inside Myself  

Foreigner - Urgent

Rod Stewart - Passion

Commodores - Lady (You Bring Me Up)

Pat Benatar - Hit Me with Your Best Shot

The Greg Kihn Band - The Breakup Song

Bruce Springsteen - Hungry Heart

Styx - Too Much Time on My Hands / The Best of Times

Journey - Who's Crying Now

The Police - De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da / Don't Stand So Close to Me

Stevie Nicks & Tom Petty - Stop Draggin' My Heart Around

Christopher Cross - Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)

Queen - Another One Bites the Dust

The Alan Parsons Project - Games People Play / Time

Eric Clapton - I Can't Stand It

Steve Winwood - While You See a Chance

Stevie Wonder - Master Blaster (Jammin')

Steely Dan - Hey Nineteen

George Harrison - All Those Years Ago 

Billy Squier - The Stroke

Santana - Winning

Heart - Tell It Like It Is

Devo - Whip It

Gary Wright - Really Wanna Know You

Diana Ross - I'm Coming Out

Boz Scaggs - Miss Sun

2 July supercell

 Photographer: Matt Melnyk

Things I learned lately 9 July

• There's a Seinfeld Lego set coming featuring Jerry's apartment. And yes, Superman is on the fridge.
  
  
  
• Trials between 2015 and 2019 in Iceland in which workers were paid the same money to work 4 days per week instead of 5 were such an "overwhelming success" that unions renegotiated, and now 86% of Iceland's workforce have either moved to shorter hours for the same pay, or will gain the right to. Workers reported feeling less stressed and at risk of burnout with improved health and work-life balance, more time to spend with their families, do hobbies and complete household chores. Spain is piloting a four day working week in part due to the challenges of coronavirus. Consumer goods giant Unilever is giving staff in New Zealand a chance to cut their hours by 20% without hurting their pay in a trial.
• Philadelphia cream cheese was invented in New York, and was never produced in Philadelphia. In the 1880s it was known as a marketing trick, because Philadelphia was known for high quality dairy products.
• The earliest T-shirt dates back to around 1904, when the Cooper Underwear Company ran a magazine ad announcing a new product for bachelors. In the "before" photo, a man averts his eyes from the camera as if embarrassed; he has lost all the buttons on his undershirt and has safety-pinned its flaps together. In the "after" photo, a virile gentleman sports a handlebar mustache, smokes a cigar and wears a "bachelor undershirt" stretchy enough to be pulled over the head. "No safety pins — no buttons — no needle — no thread", ran the slogan aimed at men with no wives who lacked sewing skills.
• Los Angeles used to have an alligator farm where visitors could pay to hang out with trained gators.   https://www.considerable.com/entertainment/retronaut/los-angeles-alligator-farm/
• The Sydney Opera House has a 12 level underground parking lot underneath.
• If you're going to pay cash for a car, mentioning it up front puts you at a disadvantage on price. They make a lot of money on the financing and are more willing to discount the sell price if they assume you'll be getting a loan through them.

This knockoff has no cleaning ability at all

 

Small things 1 July

• The zoo is a pretty safe place to fart.
  
  
  
• When you dunk a cookie in milk and see bubbles come up, that was just the cookie trying to breathe. You just drowned a cookie!
• Have we checked all food to see if exploding them makes them into something better, or did we just stop with corn?
• In my world, essential oils are what drips out of a homemade burger.
• Parenting summed up: You spend 9 hours smoking pork butt to make pulled pork (which the kids said they would eat) and 8.5 hours into it, the kids say that they just want hot dogs.
• Cats don't really want to be in your Zoom meetings. They're just checking out your virtual friends to see if they pass muster.
• Out of all the inventions in the past 100 years, the dry erase board is the most remarkable.
• What do you call a bagel that can fly? A plain bagel.
• In an alternate universe, John Wick dies and his dog avenges him.
• If the Mayans taught us anything, it's that if you don't finish something, it's not the end of the world.....

Dinosaur hunting is deplorable.

Shame on you Spielberg.

Also, the reason I thought this was funny is because allegedly, there are some people (some Americans) who think that dinosaurs are still alive in some remote regions of the world. In other words, they look at Jurassic Park as a documentary, not a fantasy film.

Do the wealthy care about climate change?

I've been thinking a lot these days about climate change. I've also been thinking a lot about income inequality. Then I decided to consider how one affects the ability to deal with the other. I may be out to lunch on this train of thought, but here we go anyway.

In much the same way that rich people and wealthy executives don't see, are not affected by, and perhaps even don't care much about wealth inequality and poverty, they probably don't care much about climate change either. I hope I'm mistaken about this, but I'll explain why I think it's true.

Wealthy people have air conditioning. Everywhere. In the office, at home, in the garage, in the car, in the yacht even. So they're not really bothered by the heat because they rarely have to endure it. If you're wealthy enough you don't even have to worry about going 'out' in the heat because you pay others to do that for you.

Wealthy people usually have pools. Again, heat is not as much of an issue when you have a pool.

Wealthy people sweat less because there's no manual labour. You can pay people to do that for you. Both at work and at home.

If a geographic area is under threat from rising ocean levels as a result of climate change, wealthy people can just move.

If a wealthy person's house gets burned down by a heat wave induced wildfire, their insurance will pay for a replacement.

In contrast, low income people don't necessarily have access to air conditioning, private pools, hired help and property insurance.

Things I learned lately 1 July

• Thousands upon thousands of newly built cars wait in factory parking lots because they're still short key parts held up by the global shortage of semiconductor chips.
• The Milano-Laghi Motorway was the first highway. It opened in 1924 and connected Milan to the exclusive Como Lake country of northern Italy. The current A9 highway follows its original path.
• Germany's Autobahn highway system stretches for 13,183 km, making it the 3rd most extensive highway system in the world behind The US and China, which is impressive considering how small Germany is in comparison.
• Michigan has a coastline on 4 of the 5 Great Lakes!
• Sweden expects to go completely cashless by 2023.
• You hate the sound of your recorded voice because it's missing the low frequency you're used to hearing. When you talk, you hear your voice as it goes to the air and back to you ear. Bit it also goes through your skull to your ear, and this bone conduction mechanism transmits the low frequencies better than air does. Your recorded voice only has the air transmitted sound.
  
  
  
• Bea Arthur, was born Bernice Frankel. During World War II, she enlisted as one of the first members of the United States Marine Corps Women's Reserve in 1943. After basic training, Arthur served as a typist at Marine headquarters in Washington, D.C. In June 1943, the Marine Corps accepted her transfer request to the Motor Transport School at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Arthur then worked as a truck driver and dispatcher in Cherry Point, North Carolina, between 1944 and 1945. She was honorably discharged at the rank of staff sergeant in September 1945. After the Marines, she studied for a year at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where she became a licensed medical technician. After interning at a local hospital for the summer, Frankel decided against working as a lab technician, departing for New York City in 1947 to enroll in the School of Drama at The New School.
• Having emojis in texts is really annoying for blind people. Their readers read them all and it wastes a lot of time.
• There's a new device for immobilizing vehicles that may replace 'the boot', called 'the barnacle'. It's a big plastic plate that suction cups to the windshield making it almost impossible to drive. A code releases it, which you get once you pay your fine. Students have already figured out how to hack it.
• William Shatner is 90.

Coincidence?

 

Dear Canada

You are 154 years old today. That's a proud achievement. You used to be the envy of the world. Inclusive. Progressive. Modern. Fair. Peacemakers. You have a lot to be proud of. Of this nobody can deny.

But now your past has come back to haunt you. You weren't always inclusive. You weren't always progressive. You weren't always fair. It was a different country then, run by different people. 

What matters is what you do now. Will you own up to your mistakes? Will you atone for them? Let's show the world that even though we're not perfect and our culture is built on a broken premise, that we have the desire and the will to make amends. Don't think "cancel culture". Think "reparation culture". We can still be proud of our successes as long as we acknowledge our failures.

In case you don't know where to begin, start with empathy, kindness and love. Always.

I love you Canada. Kisâkihitin! Kitsikakomim! (Cree and Blackfoot)