Small things 29 Dec

• George Santos: “I’m not Jewish, I’m jew-ish.”
• The only Christmas present from the 1970s that I can remember: Lite Brite.
• I think I may now qualify as a ‘prolific writer’.
• My wife uses our Google Home to add things by voice to our shopping list. Google Home doesn’t understand her very well. Our shopping list is hilarious.
• To save on a lot of wasted wrapping paper, tape and garbage, consider getting some nicely decorated gift boxes and re-using those every year under the tree. We’ve been doing that for a few years now and it’s great!
• I think residents of Yakutia (Republic of Sakha) would chuckle at our -30C temperature woes. They can get as low as -50C (-56F) on average, but have gone as low as -71C (-96F).
• Some say that Canada is their favorite country. We say it’s our favourite.
• What doesn’t kill you mutates and tries again.
• 1978: Willie Nelson releases "Mamas don’t let your babies (grow up to be cowboys)"        

            1996 (18 years later): Paula Cole releases "Where have all the cowboys gone?"

• Air fryers are so funny because, like, “That’s an oven.”
• In 1920 we took children out of the coal mines. In 2020 the most popular video game is Minecraft. The children yearn for the mines.

Peer inside the workings of a train locomotive

If you’ve ever wondered how a diesel train locomotive works, this video does a splendid job. 

From the clever folks at Animagraffs.

Hip aliens

Aliens have been watching us for so long, when they finally decide to make contact, this is what they’ll look like.

More copyright nonsense

Here's a story that you might find interesting. As a treat for all my blog readers I was going to put together a music quiz. I thought to myself, it would be cool to pick out some random songs that most people would know, maybe some people would know, maybe everybody knows, take the first few seconds of the songs and put them together in a video posted on YouTube. So I got started on that project, And after about an hour's effort the video was uploaded to YouTube checked buy the sensors from hell and it was immediately labelled a copyright infringement and therefore would be blocked from access for a handful of countries which just happens to include Canada and the United States of America.

Now let's be clear. I was not posting entire songs. In fact, I was stringing together the beginnings of songs lasting in some cases as little as one second, and as much as five or six seconds. and yet, the copyright trolls still consider that copyright infringement. So, after my joy, excitement, and anticipation of whether or not my readers would be able to guess any or all of the songs I assembled was completely trounced by a bunch of greedy, self-serving bastards and their unwavering algorithm of stupidity, I'm in a real pissy mood.

Don't worry, I'll get over it. In fact, I'm probably over it by the time this gets posted on the blog. What a world we live in, when we can't even have a simple music trivia contest without breaking some arbitrary, and I think we can argue completely overreaching law that in fact solves nothing. Sorry, I take that back, it makes lawyers extraordinarily wealthy. Merry Christmas lawyers and music publishers, I hope your stockings are filled with coal. Okay, I'm done now. 

Dim sun

 

Things I learned lately 29 Dec

• Buffalo NY has already gotten 92 inches of snow so far (as of 25 Dec). Their yearly average is 95 inches.
• Ever since the Twitter drama began unfolding, people have flocked to rival service Mastodon, which has gone from 300,000 active monthly users to 2,5000,000 in two months.
  
  
  
• Schwartz's (French: Chez Schwartz), also known as the Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen (French: Charcuterie Hébraïque de Montréal, Inc.), is a Jewish delicatessen restaurant, established on 31 December 1928, by Reuben Schwartz, a Jewish immigrant from Romania. It is considered a Montreal cultural institution. The staff of Schwartz's credits the unique flavour of their smoked meat to their mandatory 10-day meat curing time, and their brick smoke-house covered with over 90 years' worth of buildup. The deli is also credited with creating Montreal steak spice. It turns 94 years old on 31 Dec 2022.
• At one point in the 15th century, there were 3 popes at the same time. This was part of ‘The Western Schism’ in the Catholic church.
• 3 of the band Kiss’s members started out in a band called Wicked Lester.
• Flimber jurbles. Otter pops. Zooper doopers. Chup-chup. All other names different parts of the world use for what we call ‘freezies’ or ‘freeze pops’.
• Thanks to companies like Li-Cycle in Canada and the US, we are now starting to fully recycle lithium-ion batteries including those from cars.

It's the hat

 

Unreal 5

If you want to see how real gaming world rendering engines have gotten lately, you truly need to see this video. Make sure to watch it full screen.

Nothing you're about to see is real. Which is unreal. Unreal is also the name of the software used to create these environments.

Get it?

This is the image wikipedia is using to explain static electricity

 

Small things 22 Dec

• OK, I get it. Henry Cavill was a great Superman. But come on. It’s not the end of the world. Another actor is now going to play a character. In a movie. That is fiction. Moving on… What? Gal Gadot isn’t going to be Wonder Woman anymore? WTF?! Who's running this gong show? 
• Thank goodness Elon Musk is disqualified from becoming POTUS. Could you imagine this egomaniac running a country?
• It would be fun if martial arts weren’t the only thing where you show your skill level with different coloured belts. “I have a black belt in explaining things and a green belt in cooking."
• Your cat might be British if it brings you tea bags as a gift.
• Well, well, well. If it isn't the bridge I said I’d cross when I came to it…
• Is there anything better than when you experience a category five purring event?
• If a woman asks you if she should get bangs, do not answer. It’s a trap. Don't. Answer.
• Is it ethical to separate all the baby carrots from their parents?
• If I fail often enough at those ‘I’m not a robot’ captchas, maybe I’ll get invited to their world domination chat room.
• Could Pinterest be the solution for world peace? How could anyone get angry at a site filled with pretty pictures of things we like and no comments?
• I currently have a smart TV. Before that, I just had a TV with a good personality.
• Dad joke: There’s no loud laughing allowed in Hawaii. Just a low ha.
• An "out of order" sign spotted at the bottom of an uncooperative escalator: "This escalator is refusing to escalate. This has been escalated to the engineer who is on his way up (or down) to check it out."
• If you were born after 1980, you probably have never heard the former term Canadians used to refer to the Inuit people. Eskimo, which is now considered pejorative.
• Do a Google Image search on ‘Japanese lunch box’. Yeah.

How Pooh got his shirt

 

Songs I can’t get enough of lately - Dec 2022

Yaz - Situation

Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile - Over everything (pictured)

Tank and the Bangas - Nice things

Fleetwood Mac - Hypnotized

Streetheart - Action

Pink Floyd - Dogs

Gary Wright - Love is alive

A-ha - Summer moved on

Paul Mccartney & Wings - Helen wheels

Ultravox - Vienna

Ah good, my magnets have arrived

 

Things I learned lately 22 Dec

• 
  
  The new British coins will feature a likeness of King Charles III, but facing left, not right as was the case for Queen Elizabeth II. This is a longstanding (1000 year) tradition (to flip the image direction) and nobody knows why.
• John Candy and Catherine O’Hara sang backup on Tears are not enough, the 1985 charity single recorded by the temporary Canadian supergroup Northern Lights, to raise funds for relief of the famine in Ethiopia.
• The San Francisco area has such a bad vehicle break-in problem, that thieves don’t even just target parked vehicles, they go after cars stopped at lights too. It’s so bad, that many owners just leave their back hatches open when they park so that the would-be thieves see that there’s nothing worth stealing and don’t smash the glass.
• In 1976, George Harrison was found guilty of infringement of the Ronnie Mack song 'He's So
• Fine’, which the New York girl group The Chiffons recorded to become Billboard's No.1 single for four weeks in 1963. A federal District Court in New York City concluded that Harrison's first No.1 hit record 'My Sweet Lord’ (1970) 'subconsciously plagiarized' the melody of Ronnie Mack's composition', and awarded $587,000 to Mack's estate. Prior to the court decision, The Chiffons recorded their own cover version of 'My Sweet Lord' in 1975.
• These days, a ‘restart’ does a better job resetting a Windows computer’s RAM content than a ‘shutdown’. That’s because since Windows 8, the default shutdown transfers a lot of the core of the OS that was in RAM to a hibernation file for a much faster start-up when you turn your PC on. So using shutdown as a troubleshooting tool may have been the norm years ago, but restart is the way to go now. The only exception to this is if you’ve disabled fast start-up in Windows.

Stealth RickRoll

 

Small things 17 Dec

• “We already have Trump trading cards. They’re called subpoenas.” ~Jimmy Kimmel
• How people get what they want for Christmas today: They go on their spouse’s computer and search for the items they want. Then their spouse will see nothing but targeted ads for those things. You’re welcome.
• Somebody actually brought several orders of McDonald's Chicken McNuggets to a work potluck I attended.
• Every cold winter drive is just another challenge to not breathe too heavy and make the windows fog / freeze up on the inside.
• Dad joke: What happens if you eat tinsel? You get tinselitis.
• Twelve days of Christmas song review: 23 birds is too much. No chocolate? No gift cards?
• I think every group chat births a second smaller group chat without the annoying people.
• Dad joke: If you wear cowboy clothes, you are ranch dressing.
• Not to brag or anything, but I can forget what I’m doing while I’m doing it.
• I’m not lazy. I have a high Energy Star rating.
• Imagine trying on a jacket at the store only to realize that it belongs to someone who is trying on new jackets at the store.
• Why is it spelled ‘camouflage’ and not ‘                    ‘?
• My brain: “Don’t worry, I’ll remember…” One minute later. “Remember what?”

Zero stars

 

Cardboard tubes

What do you do with empty tubes of wrapping paper?

• Use them like lightsabers
• Bonk someone’s head
• Play it like a didgeridoo

I actually don’t mind numbers 10, 9, 6, and 3.

Full article explaining the choices here

Christmas audit

Dark fruit cake - YES

-25C - NO

Lights - YES

3 feet of wrapping paper on one tube - NO

Baileys - YES

Eggnog - NO

Doing donuts in empty Christmas Day mall parking lot - YES

Boxing Day Sale mall visit - NO

Gifts you weren’t expecting - YES

Going into debt from shopping - NO

Turkey with stuffing - YES

Stores stocking holiday products before 11 Nov - NO

Vince Guaraldi - YES

Mariah Carey - NO

Facetime with family back home - YES

Do I even know what I want before Black Friday? - NO

IIHF World Juniors Ice Hockey - YES

Tinsel - NO

Any Christmas production at Loose Moose Improv Theatre - YES

Elf on a shelf - NO

House parties - YES

Jingle bells, Batman smells...

 

Things I learned lately 17 Dec

• Watch for gift cards being sold in stores that have a barcode sticker on the back instead of a barcode printed directly on the plastic. Those are hacked cards that have barcodes belonging to another card in a criminal’s possession and when you fill it, it will go into their card. It’s usually not even the same store as the card you’re holding. You’ll see the difference when you buy it. Beware of sticker barcodes.
• The last Boeing 747 jumbo jet just recently rolled off the factory line in Everett, Washington.
• 7-11 is adding licensed dine-in options at some Alberta stores, with expansion expected in the next few years. Food includes chicken wings, strips, sandwiches, potato wedges, pizza, hotdogs, and sandwiches. Alcohol products include chilled beer, local craft products, as well as a variety of wines, seltzers, and coolers. This is called innovation folks.
• Indonesia's parliament passed a controversial revision of its penal code on Tuesday that criminalizes extramarital sex for citizens and visiting foreigners alike. Cohabitation will be illegal.
• Rytíři Kladno (English: Kladno Knights) is a Czech professional ice hockey team based in the city of Kladno. The team’s owner and president is Jaromír Jágr, who still plays on the team, most recently to help out while an illness routed the lineup, at age 50.
• The Badfinger song ‘Day after day’ was produced by George Harrison. George played slide guitar on the song. Leon Russell played piano.
• Ten years ago, Tesla only sold about 3,000 cars. This year, they sold 908,573 just in the first 3 quarters of 2022.
• Bernie Sanders might run again…

Here's Johnny!

 

You may have more aunts and uncles than you think

Imagine finding out via DNA test that your mom is also technically your uncle too. 

No, your mom isn’t trans, she’s a chimera. 

Read more of the fascinating story that came about through a fluke DNA paternity test.

I know this demographic

 

Small things 9 Dec

• Canadian winter game show: ‘Whose lane is it anyway?’
• There’s no wi-fi in the forest. But I promise you’ll find a better connection.
• I’m losing count of the times I hear a sound coming from my side speakers while watching TV and think that my house is possessed.
• When you forget to shake the mustard and squirt mustard-water on your food.
• I wonder if someday we’ll forgo gift wrapping presents because of the huge waste of paper.
• No, if you win at bowling, you don’t get to throw your ball to the crowd like in baseball.
• The biggest joke on humankind is that computer robots are now asking humans to verify that they’re not robots.
• All those galaxies with billions of planets in each of them and we ended up on the one with a 40 hour work week.
• Make racism wrong again.
• If you need music on the beach, you’re missing the point.
• My mom said “Only get a tattoo that means a lot to you.” So my tattoo says ‘plethora’.
• When you pull into the right lane only to realize that it’s about to end and you should have just stayed in your original lane.
• I ordered a fitbit and the bank suspended my credit card for suspected fraud.
• How about some conversation stoppers instead.

Sailor moon

 

Make non-Xmas movies more Christmas-y

• Top Gun: Rudolph
• Bullet Sleigh
• All quiet on the rooftops
• Reinman
• John Wick 4: The naughty list
• House of Claus
• Elves talking
• Santa’s Eight
• Fifty shades of red
• Giftgiver’s guide to the galaxy
• Ho Ho Land
• Man of Steal: How the Grinch stole it again
• The Lost Toys
• Claus encounters of the third kind
• Dead elves society
• Frances Ho
• Dirty rotten children

Is this how IKEA expects me to sleep?

 

Things I learned lately 9 Dec

• Texting is 30 years old.
• The Windsor tie knot is named after the Duke of Windsor.
• The idea of storing food in a clear glass jar so you could see what was inside didn’t come about until 1858, when John Mason invented it.
• In young adults under the age of 30, over half do not support capitalism.
• Mango juice is very popular among kids around the world, but not in North America.
• In the UK, marshmallow fluff (in a jar) is used as a condiment in sandwiches.
• White bread is mostly common in North America. Most European countries typically eat very grainy bread, at least in a sliced serving.
• Vietnamese Pho is actually based on the French pot-au-feu, which became feu and finally pho.
• When Warren Zevon was diagnosed with lung cancer and only given a few short months to live, he was invited to spend an entire episode on Dave Letterman’s talk show in 2002. Dave was a huge fan. After the show Dave went to Warren’s dressing room and after some chat, Warren packed up his guitar and handed it to Dave, “Take good care of this for me.” Dave sobbed.
• Some dogs do something they know they shouldn’t be doing while maintaining eye contact with you as a way to get your attention.

"He needs a sword..."

 

Where the 'X' comes from

This is the ancient Greek symbol for Christ, based on the first two letters in the Greek word for Christ.

Xmas? Now you know where the ‘X’ comes from.

When Pizza Hut becomes Pizza House

 

Small things 1 Dec

• Bring on the Christmas specials! A Charlie Brown Christmas; How the Grinch stole Christmas; Die Hard….
• #YeTrump2024
• The following applies to any political party anywhere. If a government suddenly feels the need to place limitations on the ability to legally challenge or debate new laws, that's a pretty big sign that the government plans to pass laws that a lot of people aren't going to like.
• Imagine if a government made a law saying schools can’t make kids wear a mask to school. Yeah, AB did that.
• I spotted an albino dalmatian. It’s the least I could do for it.
• When you tell your 4 year old that you’ll be travelling by ferry, make sure that they understand you don’t mean by ‘fairy’. 
• Saying ‘shark-infested waters’ is like saying ‘human-infested cities’.
• Ever forgot your password so you create a new one only to be told “You can’t use your old password”?
• What do you call a guy who tells dad jokes but has no kids? A faux pa.
• Two wrongs don’t make a right, but two Wrights made an airplane.
• Counting to 10 just makes it premeditated.
• Dollarama is like an estate sale at a hoarder’s house.
• When you bring new books home, your unread books go “WTH?!”

Bear plot hole

 

"They mostly come at night..... mostly"

Somebody remade a trailer for the classic sci-fi horror movie 'Aliens'. 

Nicely done.

Skillshare Jedi

 

167 cm

Buffalo got 66” (167 cm) of snow after it was all over.

Can you imagine if YYC got that much snow in one weekend?

Things I learned lately 1 Dec

• There is a plan afoot to have another Freedom Convoy in Feb 2023. I hope it’s -40C.
• Tesla's beta Full Self-Driving set of features is now available to all Tesla drivers in North America. FSD is only available in Teslas which have the required hardware, and only for drivers who have bought the FSD option, which now costs $15,000 if you buy it separately. If all those requirements are met, drivers can then request the feature from the car's screen.
• The saxophone was invented by Adolf Sax. He wanted to make a new instrument that was a good combination of all the existing wind instruments.
• Eggs benedict was named after Sam Benedict, a guy who always asked for his eggs to be put on an English muffin and smothered with hollandaise sauce at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
• The Crimean War of 1854 got two pieces of clothing named. Cardigan sweaters, which the Earl of Cardigan’s soldiers wore in that war. Balaclavas named after the knitted headgear the soldiers wore to stay warm in the Battle of Balaclava.