White Noise: November 2021

Saturday, November 27, 2021

Small things 27 November

In Texas, Covid has more reproductive rights than women.
Whenever a dog owner walks their dog past our house, I always greet the dog in a friendly voice. But then I wonder if the owner thought I was greeting them and it makes me laugh.
Nosferatu's friendlier brother, Yesferatu. His motto: I like B positive
Old age be like: Brain:"Move your right arm that way. Quickly." Body:"OK, I'll try. But be prepared to feel extreme physical contact with every stationary object along the way."
Remember when nobody could see our home-made videos? Because of no internet. And hardly anyone had video cameras.
If you've never been hacked, it doesn't mean your security is great. It may more likely mean you're not worth the money.
If I opened a coffee shop, I would charge a little more for each coffee, but everyone gets a free delicious pastry or donut with each purchase.
Trump once called Angela Merkel stupid. She earned a doctorate for her thesis on quantum chemistry. Also, she can hold a large beer stein with one hand.
Women used to knit or buy knitted covers for the toilet paper rolls in the bathroom and the toaster and maybe kettle in the kitchen. I kid you not.
Did you hear about the man who cooled himself to absolute zero? He's 0K
I hate peer pressure. And so should you!
It's OK for women to wear men's clothing, but not so much the other way around.

Sometimes Google has amazing images of famous places

He even has the mannerisms down pat

Uncanny scene of Jamie Costa portraying Robin Williams in the era of Mork & Mindy. It's a very deep scene.

I have heard, although I have no confirmation, that this is a pitch for a full biopic on the legend, featuring Jamie Costa.

How many fingers am I holding up?

Voice command isn't infallible

This is one of the funniest ads I've seen this year.

Simplicity is king...

Saturday mornings

If you spent any time in front of a TV on Saturday mornings in the 1970s, this little compilation video will bring back some memories.

Scooby Doo. H.R. Pufnstuf. Josie and the Pussycats. I love that they included classic commercials too. Lite Brite! Life cereal. "Hey Mikey! He likes it!"

The 'Interjections' song did it for me.

Things I learned lately 27 November

Facebook is about to delete its collection of 1 billion facial recognition files (faceprints). So as my friend Jon put it, "Facebook is about to delete their book of faces". LOL.
Mall Santas are in short supply, but big demand in Canada.
Arby's will release limited edition Crinkle Fry Vodka and Curly Fry Vodka. The fries-flavored, 80-proof bottles will be available Nov. 18. Both spirits are made from a high-quality potato vodka. The Curly Fry Vodka is distilled with cayenne, paprika, onion and garlic, while the Crinkle Fry Vodka is made with kosher salt and sugar. They'll be available in limited quantities. A second chance to buy the french-fry spirits is on Nov. 22. $59.99, including shipping and handling.
The French have officially created a gender-neutral pronoun. Iel / iels is a merging of il and elle. We have one too, ze / zir / zem / zeir, but it's not well promoted.
After Jim Morrison's death in 1971, the rest of The Doors wanted Paul Rodgers (Free) to replace him. Robbie Krieger flew to England to personally offer him the job. However, Rodgers has said that he was off the grid in a very rural area at the time, and the moment passed. In late 1973, Paul Rodgers was asked to become the singer of Deep Purple when Ian Gillan had left the band. He rejected their offer in order to start Bad Company.
The 7th largest pyramid in the world is a Bass Pro Shop, because of course it is.
In some cultures, including the Navajo tradition, pointing at a rainbow would incur the wrath of the gods. People consider rainbows to be celestial beings, or at the very least, sent by them. So you can ooh and aah at a rainbow all you like, but if you point at one, you're disrespecting the deity responsible for it.
British pubs that are hundreds of years old, had to deal with the fact that a lot of people were illiterate. So pub owners got creative and instead of using letters, they started using pictures of easily identifiable and recognizable objects in their logos. This is why pubs have odd names. The names match the visual logos.
The bicycle company Vanmoof had a problem because customers were receiving their online orders damaged from delivery people mishandling the boxes. So the company changed the packaging design by printing an image of a TV on the box to make it look like there was a television inside. This encouraged the delivery people to be more careful with something as fragile as a TV. And the results – 80% decrease in damaged deliveries.

Saturday, November 20, 2021

"Do they even make them anymore"

I'd been going to the grocery store looking for those boxes of 'Fridge-N-Freezer' baking soda with the flaps on the box sides that open to reveal a fine screen to allow the baking soda to absorb odours.

I'd go to the baking aisle, find regular boxes of baking soda, but no 'Fridge-N-Freezer' baking soda with the flaps on the box sides. Hmm, I'd think. Maybe they're out.

But it seemed they were always out. One time I even asked a grocery store staff member if they still had them, and they're like, "No. Haven't seen them in ages. Do they even make them anymore?"

For fun, thinking out loud, "Nah. They wouldn't be devious enough to put them in the aisle with the cleaning supplies or whatever. No. No, they didn't.

They put them next to the scented candles, Air Wick and stuff like that. Because when I think baking soda for the fridge, I'm definitely thinking, "I bet they're next to the scented candles."

Punked again!

Out of office comparison

Small things 20 November

Under capitalism, it's normal to let children go hungry, let banks force people out of their homes, let sick people die for lack of access to healthcare. But the idea that billionaires could just be less rich, not poor, not struggling, just less rich, is considered insane. ~Martha Kelly
I asked Siri how many shopping days left until Christmas and she said "Don't bother, everything's sold out."
You know you're old when someone writes "In the late 1900s" and you start to get offended.
Cigarettes are plant based, and they'll kill you. Just sayin'.....
Homeowner associations are bizarre. You buy a home and some person two doors down gets to tell you that you're not allowed to put a 14 foot high inflatable Santa on your front lawn.
Senior checklist. Porch? Check. White hair? Check. Gun? Check (OK, it's a water gun). Rocking chair? Be right back.
Doesn't 'never give up on your dreams' suggest that we should nap more often?
Nothing makes a capitalist happier than hiring an immigrant worker and watching you get mad at the immigrant while the capitalist sees increased profits.
At some point a kid is going to see a picture of an old touch-tone phone and wonder why they needed hashtags.
Often you will never know if the place you bought or rented once hosted a dead person.
The earth can't be flat. If it was, it would have been made into a tourist attraction by now. Also, the cats would have pushed everything off the edge.
If we filled a giant underground vat with just cooked pizza rolls, they would hold onto their heat for months. Energy storage problem solved.

UBI - it would change our lives

[Copied from a post by MadLori on FB][In other words - not my words]

When discussing Universal Basic Income, inevitably the retort comes, “So you just want people to not have to work, is that it?”, accompanied by a smug smirk, expecting me to backpedal and hem and haw, say “Of course not, that would be silly.” Except… yes. Yes, I do.

People shouldn’t HAVE to work. People should WANT to work. Sharing in the labour of building and maintaining a society because it benefits everyone should be desirable, not forced. It shouldn’t be something we do because we’ll die otherwise.

Imagine a society where survival didn’t depend on a job. Imagine how that would alter the fabric of everything. Imagine if you could leave a job without fearing the loss of income or health care. Imagine the power of the worker in that society.

If a person could survive without a job, imagine what employers would be like. They’d have to treat their workers fairly, and make themselves attractive to entice workers. They’d have to offer a better option than other employers, and make people want to participate.

Places that have offered UBI have seen the results: most people do want to work. The people who choose not to are generally young parents, students, people with disabilities and the elderly. People have a desire to contribute, for our lives to have purpose and to be useful.

And before you say it, yes, some people will take advantage. That is true for absolutely everything ever. You think people don’t take advantage of the economy we have? Like say, the 1% who grow wealthier while their employees have to work three jobs and use food stamps?

They can do that, by the way, because people are so terrified of losing a job and the destruction that would follow, that they tolerate mistreatment, disempowerment, the destruction of unions, healthcare, retirements and even their bodies to avoid it.

That would not be the case if everyone were guaranteed a baseline survival income. Your boss couldn’t treat you like shit because he knows you can’t leave. You CAN leave, and you will.

What if desperation didn’t motivate everything? Imagine the impact on health, relationships, parenting, well-being, crime, violence, progress. When you aren’t desperately scrambling for the rent, you can spare a neuron to contemplate long-term problems.

Imagine a society where terror of destitution wasn’t a constant thrum underneath everyone’s existence. Imagine the creative works that society could produce. Imagine the children it could raise, the elderly it could care for. Imagine the inventions it could produce.

Now imagine knowing all of this and saying, “NOPE. We can’t have all of that, because someone I don’t like might benefit from it. So to avoid that, the rest of you can hang.” And there you have modern conservative thinking.

Also: The number of people saying “Well, nobody would work if there’s a UBI.” Don’t realize that UBI would only provide about $20,000 - $24,000 per year. Just enough to survive on. Not enough to travel, have a car, have a house, have kids, etc. If you want any of those things, you need to work. It just gives you a basic income so that you don’t end up on the streets if you’re not working.

Why should I study science?

Things I learned lately 20 November

Halle Berry trained in multiple fighting disciplines and martial arts for 2.5 years, anywhere from 4 to 6 days per week, 4 to 6 hours per day to get prepared to fight in her new movie 'Bruised'.
A wonderful tale with a surprise at the end.
Not many music artists own their own music masters. Some that do include U2, Stevie Wonder, Metallica, LL Cool J, Ciara, Frank Ocean, Rihanna, and Jay-Z.
A felony domestic violence conviction is THE leading predictor of future violent crime among men in the US.
The US has 120 guns per 100 people. Canada has 35. The UK has 5. The number of gun deaths in the US is 120 per 100,000 people. In Canada it's 2.
Carson Productions (Yes, the one started by Johnny Carson) produced the popular film 'The Big Chill'.
The iPhone may have revolutionized smart phone design in 2007, but it was not the first smartphone. That honour goes to the Springboard Treo in 2002. You may know it as a product of the brand Palm.
A 50 gram Cadbury Caramilk chocolate bar has 240 calories and 26 grams of sugar. A Tim Hortons medium double-double coffee has 200 calories and 21 grams of sugar. A Tim Hortons Iced Capp Light has 39 grams of sugar. McCafe's Vanilla Chai Iced Frappe has 19 teaspoons, or 79 grams of sugar, as much as 2 cups of caramel praline ice cream.
Hudsons Bay Canada (HBC) let their rights to the Zeller's name expire. Now other people have applied to use it as their own brand. I guess that's what happens when you let your trademark expire.
The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, doesn't want to subsidize electric cars because only millionaires drive them. I'd like to see a real study on that statistic. I bet you the majority of electric car owners are NOT millionaires. They're just placing a good bet on our future.
As of 2019, there were over 500,000 homeless people in the US. There are also 17 million vacant homes.
The very first all female rock band was The Liverbirds.

Friday, November 12, 2021

Wish list 2021?

Items that may appear on Christmas wish lists this year

Covid Barbie
Lego forest fire
Pipelines and solar panels (The modern revision of Snakes & ladders)
Doc Mcstuffins tattoo removal kit
Trans Potato Head
Little Tikes My Own Rocket Company
Melissa & Doug L'il Realtor starter set (sell your parent's house!)
Playmobil Covid ICU set

Small things 12 November

When we spring forward to DST in March, we should do it right at like 4pm on a workday. That way, as soon as we switch, we get to go home. Only the fall back thing should happen while we're sleeping.
I've heard everything now. Vaccines checks are being referred to by some people as 'medical apartheid'.
Do you know how I know that society is now officially insane? I saw someone actually posts that it's the vaccinated people you need to stay away from.
Filmmakers: do not make your movies so dark that I am forced to see a reflection of the extreme disappointment on my face in the screen for most of the movie.
I would totally vote 'yes' if there was a referendum on adopting mandatory afternoon siestas.
Idea: Let's stop saying "History will judge them." How about we judge them now? With judges.
When you go to click on the next episode and realize you finished the entire series.
Some peoples' special talent is attracting the smoke from the bonfire no matter where they sit.
You know you're drunk when you try to connect the charger cord to your wallet to refill it with money.
The problem with cutting the tension with a knife is that now you have two tensions.
A diamond is formed by time, heat and pressure. Same for a waffle......

Mom! Not in front of my friends!

Memories of home

I look around at suburban sprawl today and I feel very fortunate to have grown up in small town with diverse geographic features.

We can start with one of the houses we lived in. It had a very old separate garage that was barely holding together. Every visit inside was a journey into mystery of what old-timey object you would find. It had rhubarb growing wild along the south wall. Just pick it and eat it I did.

If you followed our road north one block the pavement ended and residential street turned into swamp, complete with standing pools of water breeding tadpoles and frogs. Frogs and crickets made for a symphony of summer sounds.

Further north, the residential streets backed onto woods. We had woods! Actual majestic stands of trees with inviting paths to walk. The canopy providing great shade from the summer sun.

We had train tracks running northward and westward out of town, that beyond our commuter train station at the end of the line was barely used by the odd freight train a few times a week. These tracks, especially the ones heading west parallel to the shore of Lake of Two Mountains, made for convenient, although not quite comfortable walking paths to summer cottage communities and beaches along the lake.

Yes. Actual beaches with sand. Even our own town had a rough but usable public beach (El Rancho) until the property was sold to someone who built a flood wall and a homestead in its place.

Of course the real attraction was the Lake of Two Mountains, which was the meeting of the Ottawa and St Lawrence rivers at the south end, but at our north end emptied into two rivers on either side of the island of Laval, Prairies River and Riviere des Milles Illes, which had its source right at our town.

Our river had great fishing for a time, with perch, pike, sunfish, dore, bass, steelheads, sturgeon, catfish and eels. The water was not very clean, so you couldn't eat the fish, but I'm told it's much better now that they've stopped dumping sewage into it. Of course, the down side of living next to a river at the confluence of two great rivers from Ontario was spring flooding, which still occurs today.

My favourite experiences in the river involved illegally crossing the train bridge that connected Laval Ouest and Deux Montagnes and stopping off in the middle of the river at an Île Boisée (I didn't even know it had a name at the time). It was a fantastic place to get away, light a small fire or enjoy the cool breezes coming off the lake. Some braved the water separating the small island from a bigger island, Île Turcotte, a densely forested island where you could party and few would know. In the peak of summer, if the water was low enough, you could practically walk a stone path between the two islands.

I look around at the sterile suburbs and wonder aloud at how boring it must be. I am also grateful that I happen to live in a neighborhood close to the Bow River, that has some of the same ecosystems that I grew up with.

Fire the proofreader

Things I learned lately 12 November

New York City used to be home to more than 1,500 Jewish delis. Now there are 20.
Get ready for the McPlant, a meatless burger from McDonalds.
Dick's Drive-in, a Seattle area burger joint, pays their workers at least $20 an hour. Their cheeseburgers are $2.35.
NASA discovered a planet outside of the milky way recently for the first time in human history. Up until then, the planet discoveries were within our galaxy.
The Guinness book of records was invented by the Guinness beer folks. They figured a book of verifiable facts would help stop bar arguments.
A duet sung by Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson remained unfinished because Mercury walked out of the recording. He couldn’t tolerate Jackson bringing his pet llama into the studio.
A single spaghetti noodle is called a spaghetto.
Coyote vests for dogs are a thing. Google the images, I dare you.
You would think that Italy, France, and Brazil are in the top ten highest consumers of coffee. Nope. The Nordic countries dominate coffee consumption and are all within the top 10 countries worldwide. Further, Finland (the highest consumer in the world) more than doubles the annual consumption of Italy.
A 13 page article in New York Magazine called "Tribal rites of the new Saturday night" was the inspiration for the making of the movie Saturday Night Fever.

Friday, November 05, 2021

It's time to modernize road design

I would like every traffic and road engineer in Canada, but especially Calgary, to watch this critically important video about road design.

I even took the time to omit all of the boring fluff. The saleint quote: "The street design should change until the drivers are going the desired speed."

Why am I stressing that part? Because Calgary spent millions of dollars beautifying and redesigning Bowness Road in my neighbourhood to make it slower, less desirable as a pass-through road, and safer for pedestrians (and well, everyone really), but the design made too many compromises. They even took out planned stop signs.

Vax mat

Small things 5 November

I'm looking forward to a day when if I want to talk to my doctor, I no longer have to call the office, wait on hold, try to schedule an appointment, take time off of work, drive to their office, wait in the lobby, then wait in the examination room, just to ask a question, or have them look at something for 5 seconds, or renew a prescription for another year. You just go to their web site, click the "I want to speak to my doctor" button, and you get placed in a queue. When your turn comes up, you have a video or audio virtual meeting and get it over with in 5 minutes or less.
Just to be clear Facebook, our problem with you was never your name.
Take the 'p' out of pharmacist and you've gone to the dark side. The 'p' must stand for positivity....
I like how the Alberta government is saying it will only cost $235 million more to have a provincial police instead of the RCMP. Could we not spend that money on more important things like health care?
Nothing worse than using 80s/90s pop culture references in your conversations and the people born after 2000 have blank looks on their faces.
You know you're suffering severe bed head when Windows doesn't even recognize your face for Hello login (substitute iPhone facial recognition to unlock the phone).
If I hit a bus shelter with my car, the City would want me to pay for it, but if I hit a giant pothole with my car, the City also wants me....... Ah, I get it now.
Fight Club: You can't really say anything about this film. #DescribeAMovieBadly
It occurs to me that mortgage lenders insist on you coming up with a substantial down payment on a house, but while you're paying off the mortgage, they own it in full. If the bank owns it in full, then why are we giving a down payment? If you default, they kick you out, sell your house, you get nothing and they keep the down payment.
Taxes are essentially just a yearly subscription to the country you live in. Childhood is the free trial.
How do you acquire an acquired taste?

Some 10 year old boys in NW Calgary came across a house that had put out a candy bowl, but it was empty. So they gave some of their haul and remedied the situation. One of the boys was dressed as Santa.
Alberta is finally taking advantage of the 320 days of sunshine we get per year and building a solar farm as big as 1,600 football fields, or 1.3 million panels, enough to power 150,000 homes. It will become the biggest in Canada. For now.
Electric car batteries that don't quite have the same capacity needed for a car once they age are still completely functional for lesser tasks. In Lancaster, California, old battery packs from Nissan Leaf cars are packaged together to store solar power to keep street lights on overnight.
Two companies in Iceland, Climeworks and Carbfix, are extracting carbon dioxide from the air and injecting it underground, where within months, it petrifies and turns to rock, bonded with basalt.
Saudi Arabia has plans to convert a decommissioned oil rig located in the Arabian Gulf into an oil-themed "extreme park." Known as "The Rig", it will consist of 11 restaurants and 3 hotels. Those who will stay at the park will have adrenaline rush activities like roller coaster rides, bungee jumping, and skydiving.
Countries that have never had a temperature above 35C: Iceland. Ireland.
Heterochromia which means having two different colored eyes is found in less than 1% of the human population.
Purple flags at the beach mean dangerous sea life in the area.
The full name of Dom Pedro I, first emperor of Brazil, is Pedro de Alcântara Francisco Antônio João Carlos Xavier de Paula Miguel Rafael Joaquim José Gonzaga Pascoal Cipriano Serafim de Bragança e Bourbon.
The photic sneeze reflex Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst (ACHOO) syndrome or photosneezia, from the Greek φῶς, phōs, "light" and colloquially sun sneezing, is a reflex condition that causes sneezing in response to numerous stimuli, such as looking at bright lights. The condition affects 18–35% of the world's population. Seriously, ACHOO.
A man once filmed 7 episodes of a soap opera in IKEA without getting caught.