Bike tat

 

The Barnacle

 

Small things 17 May

• It’s likely a fact that every new Toronto sports team will win a championship before the Leafs win one again.
• A guy at the bar pulls out a credit card with a Maple Leafs hockey team logo on it. Someone says “I guess you’re only buying the first round, eh?” Too soon?
• Explaining to kids that back in the day, if you wanted to know about something, you consulted the encyclopedia and read 20 year old facts about that thing, unless you were missing the specific volume containing that thing. In that case, you were left ignorant.
• I wonder how many people who make a 3-point turn think they just earned 3 points each time.
• I know I’m not crazy, nor am I blind. But my mouse pointer will disappear somewhere in my two monitor screens for no reason and I will need to use the PowerToys feature ‘Find my mouse’ to be able to find it again.
• "Anybody here named "Jeff?"  Jeff: "Yes."  Geoff: "Yeos."
• The fancy restaurant name for a PB&J: Peanut puree and fruit confiture served with pain blanc.
• Emojis are just 21st century hieroglyphs.
• Mercedes has 3 ‘e’s, all pronounced differently.
• Do giraffes even know what farts smell like?
• I know people who don’t so much have a type as have a pattern.
• Someone saw bread. “Cook it again.” Someone saw toast. “One more time.” Someone saw croutons. Put that in salad. It needs to be crunchy.
• Lasagna = pasta layer cake.
• Family generations successively having fewer and fewer kids is called a receding heirline.

V Guys

 

Hello optical disc

 

Busting a homeless stereotype

[inspired by a Vox article]

A study conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change identified 50 Vancouverites who became homeless in the past 2 years. They were each given a lump sum of $7,500. No strings attached. They also got access to workshops and coaching focused on developing life skills and plans.

The study followed up with the recipients periodically, to see how they were doing and how the money was being used. A survey asked people how they thought the unconditional money would get spent by the study group. The answers suggested that it would get spent on alcohol, drugs and other temptations.

That’s not what happened. It was spent on food, clothes, and rent. They increased their stability and financial security. What’s more, giving out the cash transfers actually saved the broader society money. Enabling 50 people to move into housing faster saved the shelter system $8,277 per person over the year, for a total savings of $413,850. That’s more than the value of the cash transfers, which means the transfers pay for themselves.

This is also the general idea behind basic income. The government should give every citizen a monthly infusion of free money with no strings attached. This idea has gained momentum, with several countries running pilot programs to test it. The evidence so far shows that getting a basic income tends to boost happiness, health, school attendance, and trust in social institutions, while reducing crime. Recipients generally spend the money on necessities like food, clothes, and utility bills.

Canadian lawmakers are currently considering a bill that would create a national framework for a guaranteed income to cover basic living expenses for people over age 17. That would include temporary workers, permanent residents, and refugee claimants.

Caption this cat

I’ll start:

“I’m not so sure I want you living in my house anymore”, the cat said, with the most serious look in his eyes.

Shark first aid

 

Do your kids’ Instagram accounts seem too pure to be true?

That’s because they probably are. Most youth, having already learned that it’s not wise to be on Facebook, a social media hangout now dominated by older adults (parents), when they opened Instagram accounts, they used the opportunity to create a double life online, using a Rinsta account and a Finsta account.

Rinsta: This is short for "real Instagram." It refers to a person's primary and public Instagram account, where they typically share posts with a wider audience. Rinsta accounts often showcase a curated, positive and polished version of one's life, and they are usually followed by a mix of friends, family, acquaintances, and sometimes even strangers.

Finsta: This is short for "fake Instagram." A finsta is a secondary, private Instagram account that some users create. It's often used to share more personal and unfiltered content with a select group of close friends. Finsta accounts can be a bit more candid and usually show a different side of the user compared to their other account.

I am so going to animals

 

Cannonballs

 

Things I learned lately 17 May

• On Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s album Deja Vu there are 6 people on the cover. The other two are drummer Dallas Taylor and bassist Greg Reeves.
• Andy Kim, a Canadian music star from the 70s, born in Montreal, was the son of Lebanese parents.
• As many commuters travel into New York City every workday as live in the city of Calgary.
• Türkiye has the highest consumption of tea per capita, even more than Ireland and the UK.
• You’ve never actually heard the Monster Mash, you’ve just heard a song talking about it.
• The plural of cul-de-sac is culs-de-sac.
• Mick Jones, the founder of Foreigner, once worked with Gary Wright, Peter Frampton and George Harrison.
• The word "ghetto" originally comes from the Italian word "ghèto" which means "slag" in Venetian, referring to a foundry where slag was deposited during metal casting. It was first used in Venice in the early 16th century to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live. The word reflects the area's prior use before it became a Jewish quarter. The term "ghetto" has evolved and is now used more broadly to describe any urban area primarily inhabited by a specific ethnic or economic group, often characterized by poverty, discrimination, and social isolation. The use of the term encompasses various minority groups confined to specific areas due to social, legal, or economic pressures.

But...

 

Unattended children

 

For the really big pests

 

Small things 10 May

• A blizzard disproves climate change as much as an idiot disproves evolution.
• Wondering why we drew the sun in the corner of the paper as a child.
• Server in a restaurant: “Is everything OK? You haven’t photographed your food.”
• “I can summarize how I succeed as a leader: Listen to your employees, listen to your customers, shut the f--- up, and do what they tell you.”  ~John Legere (formerly T-Mobile US CEO)
• "So protest, but think of your protest like sex. You can be loud and wild and do it all night long. But when something starts to burn, you should probably stop."  ~Trevor Noah (The Daily Show)
• “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers' payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation. Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that's what 99% of scientists tell us. And then we would have a debate about how to fix it. That's how, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach. So you'd argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don't have that.”  ~Barack Obama
• Imagine the moment appetizers were introduced. “I know you’re looking forward to the meal, but before we get to that, how about we indulge in some little samples of food?”
• When Godzilla first came out, God was probably like "That name's way cooler."
• Can you trust a Doctor whose spouse sells coffins?

Skeptical cat is skeptical

 

Cat's pajamas

 

Milk bags

Americans like to point out that Canadians buy milk in bags, but the truth is only part of Canada uses milk bags. The story of milk bags in Canada begins in the 1960s. At the time, milk came in glass bottles primarily. Some producers sold milk in cardboard or plastic jugs. In Canada's Centennial Year of 1967, DuPont introduced milk bags to the country. Some European countries used milk bags, so DuPont needed to buy European equipment for the bags. This turned out to be a good move because in the 1970s, Canada moved towards the metric system. While other companies had to redesign all of their bottles, jugs and cartons, milk bag packaging machines only needed to be resized at a very low cost. When Canada went metric, three-quart milk bags became four-liter milk bags without much trouble.

Many in the dairy industry in Canada liked milk bags because they were easier to ship than glass bottles. But the bags were not as popular everywhere. Even though Americans like to assume all of Canada uses milk bags, they are only widely used in Eastern Canada in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. Currently, bagged milk sales account for 80% of milk sales in many areas of Ontario. Milk bags are not really sold in Western Canada, Newfoundland or the Territories. If they are, they are hard to find.

In the 1980s after the government relaxed metric measurements, milk jugs became more popular in various areas of the country. By the 1990s, milk bags were gone in places like Alberta. Ontario held on though. The reason was that a retailer had to implement a deposit or recycling system for milk jugs, which consumers paid at the store. Milk bags don't have that requirement, so retailers keep using bags and consumers keep buying them. This regulation was amended in 2018, but it can take years for consumers to break habits. So in Ontario at least, milk bags will continue to be popular for many years to come.

So true

 

I would wear this just to see if people notice

 

My substack content now includes audio!

Remember me going on about how all my latest writing will be featured on my substack page? No? Oh yeah, I’m on substack now. It’s here: https://karlplesz.substack.com/

Anyway, for a while it’s been nothing but writing. But now I’ll be adding spoken posts too, especially if they feature anything about music. That’s right, you can finally listen to the dulcet tones of yours truly. Enjoy.

"I remember that place..."

 

A truly Canadian poem

 

Things I learned lately 10 May

• Travel sites like Booking.com don’t have any issues randomly cancelling bookings so they can relist them at a significantly higher price.
• Before they were called french fries, they were called french frieds. In Quebec anyway.
• Singapore has used land reclamation to increase its available land area by 23% since 1965.
• In Old English, poetry didn’t rhyme. It was all about the alliteration of the words. Rhyming only came into being after Norman influence. 
• While in English we use "oink oink", the French equivalent animal sound for pigs is "groin-groin". Oinque!
• The name "Scotch tape" originated from an accidental insult during the early development of the adhesive tape by 3M. In the 1920s, 3M employee Richard Drew invented a masking tape to help auto painters achieve clean lines between two paint colors. In the initial prototypes, Drew applied only minimal adhesive to the tape to save costs. When a frustrated auto painter saw the tape failing to stick properly, he remarked that Drew was being too "Scotch", referring to the stereotype of Scottish frugality. Even when 3M later perfected the adhesive tape by applying more glue, the name "Scotch tape" had already caught on among the auto painters who used it. 3M decided to embrace the name and marketed it as the "Scotch" brand. 
• Remember Car2Go? It was a car sharing company operated by Mercedes in Canada and other countries. It didn’t fare well, and many folks assumed that car sharing is dead in Canada. It is not. Communauto is a Canadian car sharing company operating in 15 cities and also Paris, France. It has a fleet of over 4,000 vehicles and over 40,000 members.

Name all the ways this photo is ghetto

 

I’ll start - a slice of bread for an oven mitt

Name this dog band

 

Small things 3 May

• If we’re getting chips put inside us by the government or whoever, I hope I get the Doritos zesty cheese variety.
• Sometimes I want to eat the pizza crust. Sometimes I do not.
• I remember a time in the 1970s when if you admitted that you listened to Abba, people would call you gay as an insult (back when that was a bad thing), and then they made the movie Mama Mia and suddenly listening to Abba was considered being like totally gay.
• The decision tree you go through when deciding whether to get the basic car wash, the deluxe car wash, or the ultimate with the tri-colour wax.
• I could never live in a rural home. The pain just to give directions to your house would be nuts, never mind worrying about Amazon deliveries.
• New Folder (2), the sequel.
• How people react when you use their driveway to turn around.
• "In life, be cautious of how broad is the brush with which you paint the views of those you don't agree with." ~Neil deGrasse Tyson
• When your Roomba beats you to a piece of popcorn you drop on the floor - this is how the war against the machines begins.
• Saw this online: “How is same-sex marriage viewed where you live?” “In Canada, we just call it marriage, and since it's not hockey, nobody really cares which team you're playing for.”
• Radish. Adj. When something’s kind of rad, but not too rad.
• When you think you’ve muted yourself in a Teams meeting and let a really long, loud fart rip. Then you see your name light up as it does when Teams hears you speaking.

Tiger food

 

It was too obvious maybe?

 

45 singles

For the benefit of those born after the era of vinyl dominance was overshadowed by CDs and mp3s, let me tell you all about 45 RPM single records.

Just as they are today, albums existed in long play (LP) 12 inch vinyl form as well, although you were limited to only being able to fit 22 minutes of music on each side of a 33 ⅓ RPM vinyl disc. A unique element of listening to albums on vinyl was the act of flipping the disc over to hear side two of an album. The order and placement of the songs was considered to create a flow.

But music was also released in the form of singles on smaller, 7 inch discs with a much bigger cutout in the center. A single had the song being promoted on A side and the B side was usually just a throw-away song, sometimes not even from the album the single was taken from.

Radio stations and professional disc jockeys loved the 45 single, as it was smaller and didn’t force you to carry entire albums with you to various jobs. 45 singles also fit nicely into jukeboxes, a source of music the customers could select from in bars, restaurants, and pool halls. 45 RPM singles were a music delivery mechanism to promote a song, and since radio stations typically played nothing but 45s, if the record label put one of your songs on a 45, there was a good chance it would end up on the airwaves, especially if the DJ (or the listeners) liked it.

What I found fascinating was the B side. Most of the time, you’d listen to it and think, “Wow! I can’t believe they recorded that with a straight face.” But sometimes, the B side was a masterpiece in its own right. Some examples:

Elton John A: Bennie and the jets B: Harmony

Bruce Springsteen A: Dancing in the dark B: Pink Cadillac

The Beatles A: Hey Jude B: Revolution

Crosby, Stills & Nash A: Suite: Judy blue eyes B: Long time gone

The Pretenders A: Back on the chain gang B: My city was gone

Ritchie Valens A: Donna B: La bamba

Buffalo Springfield A: Bluebird B: Mr soul

CCR A: Proud Mary B: Born on the bayou

Fleetwood Mac A: Go your own way B: Silver springs

The Beatles A: Hello goodbye B: I am the walrus

The Rolling Stones A: Honky tonk women B: You can’t always get what you want

The Smiths A: William it was really nothing B: How soon is now (It became an A side in 5 months)

The Guess Who A: American woman B: No sugar tonight

Elton John A: Border song B: Bad side of the moon

Joni Mitchell A: Big yellow taxi B: Woodstock

Carole King A: It’s too late B:I feel the earth move

Chicago A: Beginnings B: Colour my world

Janis Joplin A: Cry baby B: Mercedes Benz

Gary Glitter A: Rock & roll B: Rock & roll part 2 (Instrumental became much more popular)

KC & The Sunshine Band A: Shake your booty B: Boogie shoes

Queen A: We are the champions B: We will rock you

Rush A: Limelight B: YYZ

The B-52s A: Love shack B: Channel Z (I discovered this one during my radio show in CFS Alert)

How many of you know what this is?

 

Politicians discussing if climate change is real

 

Radar fences

In Canada, during the cold war, there were 3 ‘radar fences’, lines of radar sites built across the country to detect invading Russian bombers. The southernmost line was the Pinetree line, the next one further north was the McGill fence, and finally in the far north was the Dew line.

The Pinetree line was in operation from the 1950s to the 1980s. Its stations are in brown.

The McGill fence was in operation from 1958 to 1965. Its stations are in yellow.

The Dew line was operational from 1957 to 1993. Its stations are in black.

TVs 1946-1951

 

Oh lawd, he poopin'

If I fits I sh*ts.

He had to take such a huge dump he had to leave his front outside.

We’re gonna need a bigger kitty litter box.

Things I learned lately 3 May

• Distracted driving accounts for 25% of traffic deaths in Alberta.
• They’re building a high speed rail line between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga (Northeastern LA) called Brightline West.
• When early scientists discovered vacuum, they didn’t think it contained nothing because just like air is needed to carry sound, they thought light needed a medium to carry it as well. Since you could see stuff inside a vacuum, there had to be ‘something’ in there. They called it luminiferous ether. Therefore there is no such thing as empty space. It drove scientists nuts because they couldn’t measure it. We know now that there’s no such thing.
• Simon and Garfunkel’s debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, which featured The Sound of Silence, was a flop.
• During the Antarctic summers, there can be as many as 10,000 scientists and support staff working there and doing research. In the winter time, that number drops down to about 1,000. 
• In 1815, the eruption of Mt. Tambora caused crops to fail around the world the following year. That made it unaffordable to feed horses, which threw a damper into transportation. So a young German named Karl von Drais invented a device called the laufmaschine (running machine) consisting of two wheels, a frame and a saddle. It was basically a balance bike for adults. This was way faster than walking. In England, the invention was called a hobby-horse. It wasn't long before other engineers made additions that led to the modern concept of a bicycle.
• Calculations say there is 5 times more dark matter in the universe than normal matter, but there’s no actual proof.
• Chickens now make up more than 90% of land animals farmed in the US. In 2022, 9.2 billion of them were slaughtered.