Damned moths

 

Now’s your chance to see it

Movies that are streaming so you can see them once and for all:

Leon: The Professional (Amazon Prime)

Carnage (Amazon Prime)

Best in show (Crave)

Unbreakable (Disney+)

Searching for Sugar Man (Amazon Prime)

Planes, Trains & Automobiles (Netflix)

Moon (Amazon Prime)

Memento (Amazon Prime)

Little Miss Sunshine (Disney+)

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (Amazon Prime)

American Psycho (Netflix)

Obi-wan had a cruel sense of humour

 

Small things 28 Jan

• Tim’s ‘roll up the rim to win’ contest. The prizes are a bit different depending on where you live. In some places you can win 25 centimetres of snow!
• One minute you’re young and fun. Next, you’re turning down the stereo in your car to see better.
• When your brain is like a web browser. 11 tabs are open, 4 of them are frozen and you don’t know where the music is coming from.
• What’s that? The latest vaccine really knocked you on your ass? You could say they set Pfizers on stun.
• The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched over 45 years ago, in 1977. They both passed Jupiter and Saturn within 4 years and Voyager 2 got to Uranus by 1986, after 8.5 years of flight. It went on to Neptune by 1989.
• Remember when everybody’s phone number, and address were published in a book that got sent to every house? Before there were unlisted numbers?
• “The floor is lava!” ~everyone, Pompei, 79 A.D.
• Cucumber slices. Or as they are also known, salad cookies.
• Back in my day, the internet used to come in the mail.
• Crème d’oeuf. Or as some of you might call it - mayo. 
• It’s not a dad bod, it’s a father figure.
• Natural selection favours the paranoid.
• Ppl don’t think that grass be wet in the morning. But it dew.

Ah-ooo!

 

This tee references a great old song...

Would $600 over 6 months help?

Okay here goes. The government of Alberta in their infinite wisdom have decided that the best way to help Albertans in need was to offer two types of financial support. The first type was to suspend the provincial gasoline tax until further notice, which amounts to about 13 cents per litre, even though most of that tax had already been suspended, and we were in fact only eliminating the final four cents per litre.  

My first question is, who is this helping exactly? Most people living near or below the poverty line don't own a car, and therefore are not buying gasoline. The people who are benefiting the most from this discount are the people who own multiple vehicles, for that matter multiple large vehicles. If anything, and yes I am going there, these people should be paying more for their gasoline, because we are obviously making it too easy to own these kinds of vehicles. This is my opinion and I am entitled to it. Seriously though, this is not targeting the people who need the most help in these times of financial hardship. Moving on. 

The second type of help offered by the government is six payments of $100 per month for 6 months. Any person in a family earning less than $180,000 a year who is either a senior or a parent with children is eligible. First of all, $180,000 a year is the threshold? Doesn't that seem a little bit high? Are families earning that kind of money struggling to pay their phone bill? Are they having to put the meat back at the grocery store and settle for Kraft Dinner instead? Imagine how much of a difference $600 is going to make to a family earning more than $100,000 a year, never mind $180,000. What about people living near or below the poverty line who aren't seniors, or don't have kids? Don't they deserve help too? I have a feeling that it is these people who are making the hard sacrifices trying to make ends meet. 

I have yet to talk to anyone, regardless of their political affiliation, ideology, or financial methodology who disagrees with these basic questions and obvious misguided decisions. So the question is, why would the government offer a financial incentive only to families with children and seniors? It doesn't take a University degree in politics to know the answer to that question. It's because this is the demographic that is sitting on the fence wondering who to vote for in the next election. It's so obvious that it is disgusting. It is one more reason why many of the conservative minded people that I know have made it very clear to anyone who will listen that they are not going to be re-electing this government. 

Got any grapes?

 

I love that this tee design only makes sense if you know one very particular joke

Things I learned lately 28 Jan

• The Vancouver Canucks NHL hockey team are currently paying over $7 million to 3 current/former coaches.
• Uber and Lyft will need to offer a completely electric fleet in NYC by 2030.
• A little girl in Cumberland, Rhode Island sent a partly bitten cookie to the police department and asked them to run a DNA test on it to check if Santa is real.
• Let me be frank for a sec. Oscar Meyer is hiring recent US college grads for new drivers of their 'Weiner-mobile' fleet, aka “Hotdoggers”. Sounds like buns of fun. Would you relish the job?
• In places where they’ve already switched to variable rate electricity (cheap overnight and expensive during peak time of the day), homes have begun installing storage batteries to charge overnight and release the power during the most expensive parts of the day. 
• The Stereo 8-track cartridge was created in 1964 by a consortium led by Bill Lear, of LearJet Corporation, along with Ampex, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Motorola, and RCA Victor Records.
• When companies were vying for the next music tape format to replace 8-track, the European compact cassette (the only format that endured) was competing for a time with the Japanese HiPac tape cartridge (made by Pioneer, Sharp, Toshiba and Hitachi), which had tape the same width as compact cassette, but a loop mechanism similar to 8-track tape.   
• BC almost left the Canadian Confederation after being promised that a transcontinental railway would link coast to coast when they joined in 1871. The railway was supposed to be finished by 1881, but for horrible mismanagement by various governments. The work was then assigned to a newly incorporated CPR company, which was allowed an additional ten years to complete the line, and they did it in five, the last spike going in on 7 Nov 1885.

Common myths

 

Small things 19 Jan

• I think that if I ever ran for office, I’d try to pull a Santos. Just in case I do someday, we may as well start things off right. I wrote two Pulitzer Prize winning books in the last two years. David Suzuki asked me if I would ghost-write his autobiography.
• Funniest thing I heard this week: [discussing George Santos] “Do you think it’s the uh chat bot? [probably referring to ChatGPT AI] Like, do you think George Santos typed in ‘lies I could tell that people wouldn’t check’?” ~Jon Stewart 
• My birth mother died in 1961, less than a week after I was born. My father died in 2023, almost 62 years later. That’s quite the span.
• “Am I adopted?” “Not yet. We haven’t found a family that will take you.”
• If your company buys everyone a subscription to LinkedIn Learning, they’re basically paying a data scraper to list your employees to other companies who would poach them. Basically.
• Hypothermia - the coolest way to die.
• "Bobby Hull said that once he clocked Jean Béliveau with an elbow when the two were lingering behind the play. It was a cheap shot, and Hull knew it. A few seconds later, he heard this deep voice ringing as if from the heavens: “Bobby,” the voice of Béliveau said, “I’m very disappointed in you.”
• Imagine the first hug. Talk about awkward. “What are you doing? Why are you grabbing me?” “Sssssshh. Just trust me.”
• Maybe the reason there have been so many UFO sightings is because in general, people are just really bad at identifying things in the sky.
• You know you’re old when you no longer have to inquire about the senior discount. They just give it to you.

Arch enemies

 

Alcohol not as safe as we thought

Years ago, we were led to believe that 10-15 drinks a week was perfectly fine. But now that experts have had a chance to look at a lot more data, they have concluded that anything more than 2 drinks per week puts people at a higher risk for certain cancers, while more than 7 creates a risk for heart disease and stroke.

This latest news is based on almost 6,000 peer-reviewed studies. Experts are suggesting that it’s time to put warning labels on products containing alcohol.

Calvin knows

 

Here comes XBB.1.5

This graph shows just how quickly variants of the Covid virus evolve and become the dominant strain. This is just a period of 3 months. According to Dr John Campbell, everyone will be getting exposed to XBB.1.5 in the next month or so. It’s very infectious. Vaccine or prior infection won’t matter very much, but it will be just like a typical cold for most people. The good news is that if you get it, your immunity levels will go up dramatically. Experts expect 80% of Americans will be exposed to it very soon.

Statler - Waldorf '24

 

Things I learned lately 19 Jan

• There have been 98 confirmed tornados so far in the US in January 2023 alone. 
• ExxonMobil’s own climate research from the 1970s secretly predicted with astonishing accuracy how climate change would evolve over the following 50 years and yet they denied publicly that burning fossil fuels was a problem.
• Tesla now outsells both BMW and Mercedes Benz in the US and is now the top selling luxury car brand.
• A woman in Mexico got a tattoo on her arm that can launch her Spotify playlist for a DJ to play from it at the club.
• At $5,000 each, the 12 tires on an Airbus A340, would cost a total of $60,000.
• Treadmills were introduced before the development of powered machines to harness the power of animals or humans to do work, often a type of mill operated by a person or animal treading the steps of a treadwheel to grind grain. In later times, treadmills were used as punishment devices for people sentenced to hard labour in prisons.
• I have heard that people who were born deaf and get their hearing later in life are surprised to discover that the sun doesn’t make any noise.
• Gay men were allowed to serve in the Swedish military even before Sweden de-medicalized homosexuality in 1979.

Don’t worry, the rear defroster will take care of it

 

Small things 13 Jan

• I saw a chameleon today. It must have been handicapped.
• It’s sad how many cookies that the cookie monster wasted pretending to eat them, but they really just crumbled and fell to the floor.
• Quarantine coffee: It was like a normal coffee except it had a margarita in it and also no coffee.
• Maybe the next time I’m telling a story about something that happened when I was 40 and they say “Oh that’s the year I was born!” I’ll just say, “Well then maybe you’re not old enough to listen to this story…”
• Some puns make me numb, but math puns make me number.
• The year is 2243. Disease and hunger are eradicated. The terraforming of Mars is complete. The icon for ‘save’ is still a floppy disk.
• Boss: I don’t pay you to watch YouTube. Me: You SHOULD pay me to watch YouTube.
• Sam being able to carry Frodo and not be affected by the ring means the ring doesn't understand transitive properties so they could have just taped the ring to a mouse and then carried the mouse with no ill effects. Whole thing would have taken 20 minutes.
• This was me in school. Test question: “Write 80-100 words.” Me: 80-100 words.
• You can’t buy hot pockets. You can only buy cold pockets. You supply the heat. Don’t believe the hype.
• I get offended when my body decides we're gonna get sick. Like I fed you a VEGETABLE last week, how DARE you betray me like this. Ungrateful.
• Bad movie plot description: “Dude died but they made him go to work anyway.” (Robocop)

Bird on skylight

 

Wash your hands and phone at the same time

In Japan, there’s a new bathroom sink offering that also has a slot to UV sterilize your cell phone. One was spotted at a McDonald’s, if you watch the video in the article.

It’s called WOSH. I’d use it…

So that's what those buttons are for....

 

Plan versus react

There’s a lot of bluster from Alberta about the federal government’s ‘just transition’ legislation and the propaganda would have us believe that it’s bad for Alberta, even though their ministry helped in its creation. Alberta claims that the best approach is making the industry cleaner. Imagine if horse and buggy owners in the twilight of the car culture had said that the solution was not to find a way to transition to cars, but to do a better job of cleaning up horse turds.

This article does a good, balanced job of explaining the situation. The important take-away is that while the industry is doing fine, it’s nowhere as robust as predicted and even the most optimistic predictions have it peaking much sooner than originally expected.

Will our government just do as it always does and react just in time, or not in time? Watch this space.

Egg freeze

Ontario: “You can fry an egg on the sidewalk in summer.”

Nunavut: “That’s cute.”

Things I learned lately 13 Jan

• Things George Santos lied about before being elected: high school resume; college resume; worked at Goldman Sachs / Citigroup; 9/11 claimed his mother’s life; mother fled socialism in Europe; grandparents survived holocaust; lost employees in Pulse nightclub shooting; had a non-profit pet charity; claimed to be Jewish. He refuses to resign (as of 12 Jan) even as some members of his party have disavowed him.
• There’s an electric vehicle being designed from the ground up in Canada under the name Project Arrow (fitting). Its prototype was just unveiled at CES. It has some big partners in the auto industry supply chain and major education partners. They’re not going for the cheapest price, they’re going for the highest quality. Here’s hoping. 
• Various airports get rid of their snow using a snow melter. It’s like a big hopper that melts whole front end loaders full of snow and dumps the water down the storm drain on the tarmac. Here’s a video of one in action. 
• When David Geffen signed Neil Young to a record deal in the early 1980s, he was expecting more albums along the lines of Rust Never Sleeps. What he got was Kraftwerk-like Trans, the rockabilly Everybody’s Rockin’ and the country Old Ways. Geffen was so pissed, he filed a lawsuit against Young for making “unrepresentative” music.
• Before he began work scoring movies, Hans Zimmer briefly worked with the band The Buggles. He can be seen briefly in the Buggles' music video for the 1979 song "Video Killed the Radio Star".

Small things 6 Jan

• In 2023 I’m gonna be unstable.  Unstoppable! Damn you autocorrect!
• For crying out loud people, the phrase is “nipped it in the bud.” No butts were nipped.
• Why would anybody let Jesus take the wheel? He cannot possibly have a driver’s license. Sorry Jesus. Not my car. Also, “Who was driving at the time of the accident?” “Uh, Jesus.”
• Felinetrovert (n): a person who prefers the company of cats to people.
• In Canada we have a ‘saying sorry unnecessarily’ jar.
• If you’re the kind of person who gets into long term feuds with people, just don’t get into any group photos.
• Stresslaxing (v): being stressed that relaxing makes you more stressed because you’re not doing the thing that’s making you stressed.
• We now have 3 Tim Hortons locations less than 2.5 kilometres from our house. 

1992: Don’t swallow the mouthwash!

2002: Just put this mouthwash strip in your mouth, let it dissolve, and swallow.

Discman

Hey kids! 

This was a music playing device that only played properly if you were standing perfectly still. 

We also used it to destroy our music CDs.

Tell me I'm wrong

OK, maybe I'm wrong, but this here is just a very loud invitation to do something worthy of getting kicked out of the store.

Look closely...

Hoops!

Montreal snow removal

 

AI generated music video

There is so much eye candy to look at here, and it’s set to Pink Floyd’s Echoes from the album Meddle.

Give it a few minutes. The imagery is a bit generic at first, but gets more grandiose with each passing moment.

Around the 12:00 mark, the AI is doing a magnificent job changing the image with each of Richard Wright’s key presses. It’s learning.

Blog post 12,000

 That's a milestone, don't you think?

Things that make you go hmmm

 

Things I learned lately 6 Jan

• By 9:43 am on the 3rd of January, Canada’s richest CEOs have already earned the average worker’s annual salary.
• Based on actual scientific data (see for yourself here), it seems that adverse side-effects of Covid vaccines were high enough to lead research experts to say “The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes.” In plain English, they suggest that it would be wise to study what segment of the population is most at risk of serious harm from the virus weighed against who is at risk of serious harm from the vaccine. This has yet to happen.
• Children aged 12 and under no longer need to pay a fare to ride Calgary Transit.
• The first name that has the most nicknames is Elizabeth. It helps that the name has four syllables.
• The board game Monopoly started out being called The Landlord Game.
• When Prince changed his name to a symbol in 1993, it was to try and get his contract nullified with Warner Records. It didn’t work.