Small things 24 Feb

• Every high voltage tower should have one of those vertical spinning wind turbine generators installed in them. That way, they can both support the grid and add to it at the same time.
• In 1945, the Dutch royal family sent 100,000 tulip bulbs to Ottawa in gratitude for Canadians having sheltered the future Queen Juliana and her family for the preceding three years during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The most noteworthy event during their time in Canada was the birth in 1943 of Princess Margriet at the Ottawa Civic Hospital. The maternity ward was temporarily declared to be extraterritorial by the Canadian government, thereby allowing Princess Margriet's citizenship to be solely influenced by her mother's Dutch citizenship. In 1946, Juliana sent another 20,500 bulbs requesting that a display be created for the hospital, and promised to send 10,000 more bulbs each year. By 1963 the festival featured more than 2 million tulips, rising to nearly 3 million by 1995. Princess Margriet of the Netherlands attending the Canadian Tulip Festival in May 2002. In the years following Queen Juliana's original donation, Ottawa became famous for its tulips and in 1953 the Ottawa Board of Trade and photographer Malak Karsh organized the first Canadian Tulip Festival. Queen Juliana returned to celebrate the festival in 1967, and Princess Margriet returned in 2002 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the festival.
  
  
  
• China Girl, co-written by David Bowie and Iggy Pop, first appeared on an Iggy Pop album in 1977. It did not become popular until it was rerecorded and released by Bowie in 1983. What prompted Bowie to put the song on one of his own albums was that Iggy Pop was broke due to his struggle with drug addiction. Bowie decided to re-record and release the song on his own record so that Iggy Pop could collect half the royalties as co-writer of the track and get back on his feet.

Foot of sun

We almost got a foot of sun this morning.

I’m not coming in.

AI-generated video

If you’ve never seen AI-generated video, this Dandy Warhol music video has an example of what’s possible. 

Keep in mind though, that as imperfect as the result is, it’s stylistically amazing and wasn’t even possible a mere few months ago. 

Who knows what will be possible in a year. 5 years.

Meet my toys

 

Tone deaf?

I was quite surprised at our Premier’s announcement on 21 Feb that a priority starting now will be to focus on growing the Heritage Fund in a very big way. I have some thoughts.

Disclaimer: I am a fan of saving money for a rainy day. We practice this in our home, so I appreciate the sentiment.

I have never spoken to anyone in Alberta and heard them mention that our rainy day fund needs some serious attention. At least, not in the last few years. So I don’t understand why it has suddenly become a priority for our government. Can I use an analogy to explain my position?

Imagine the province is a family. We’re earning decent money right now, but that hasn’t always been the case, and it isn’t guaranteed going forward. The house is in serious need of some repair and some appliances need replacing. Imagine if one of us suggests that maybe we should forego the repairs and purchases and sock a bunch of money into the TFSA. Not just today. For the next 25 years. I’m pretty sure that idea would not fly.

Yet that is exactly what the government of Alberta is suggesting we need to do. All the while, people are concerned about the cost of housing, groceries, utility bills, gas prices, the lack of doctors, surgery wait lists, unsustainable growth, our inability to adequately fight forest fires, and so much more.

I’m starting to wonder if the fund talk is a precursor to justifying why they need to hijack the CPP. But for now, it is one more example of their priorities being in the wrong place, in my humble opinion.

If you’re a fan of ‘What we do in the shadows’ you get it

 

Things I learned lately 24 Feb

• An Alabama court ruled that frozen embryos, like the kind that result from IVF treatments, are humans and can’t be destroyed.
• Norway aims to become the first nation to end the sale of gasoline and diesel cars by 2025. They are very close to this objective.
• Mark Hamill was in the pilot episode of the Eight is Enough television series.
• The owner of a soap factory in Montreal refused to sell his property to make way for the Jacques Cartier bridge approach, so they had to curve the ramp around the factory. It became known as the crooked bridge.
• The recurring “Jeux sans frontières” that is sung throughout the Peter Gabriel song Games Without Frontiers is sung by Kate Bush.
• April Wine’s album Stand Back was the first Canadian album to sell more than 100,000 copies.
• April Wine’s album First Glance was the first Canadian album to achieve Gold status (500,000 album sales) outside of Canada (US).
• Have you ever wanted to browse a web site via its pictures rather than via its text? Go to Google, and choose the "Images" tab. Then type in site:sitename.com, where sitename is the name of the site you want to browse visually, such as amazon.com. Then, when you see a picture you like, just click on it and Google will take you to the page that has the picture. Of course, some sites offer better visual browsing than others.
• The first guest host on Saturday Night Live was George Carlin, with musical guest Billy Preston.
• Steve Martin has been a guest host on SNL 16 times.

Funny dentist

 

Small things 16 Feb

• Whenever I feel blue, I just start breathing again.
• In English, every odd number contains an ‘e’.
• The numbers 1-99 don’t contain an ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, or ‘d’.
• Darlene was having some difficulty packing items into a box to mail out as a parcel when I showed up to help her. On the successful fitting of all items into the box I said, "Men are better at spatial relationships." To which she responded, "Too bad they're not better at other kinds of relationships." What is she even talking about?
• The first North American music band to be featured on the cover of Time magazine was The Band on January 12, 1970.
• “The present is a ‘past factory’.” ~Steven Wright
• Atheism - a non-prophet organization.
• Most of the things you worry about never happen.
• The letters G and T are very close to each other on a computer keyboard. Consequently, it may be a good idea to check your outgoing emails closely if you typically end your messages with the phrase "Regards".
• It’s a small, not a tall.

Recipe murderer

 

We gotta get outta this place

The Boss's speech could be the best keynote speaker performance in the history of SXSW.

If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, just skip to the 23:00 mark to 27:53 at least.

I'm this many years old

 

Toastés all dressed

The fact that America’s Test Kitchen has an article on the venerable Montreal style hot dog warms my heart.

That right there is a "toastie all-dressed". Don't those fires look amazing?

Orange Julep, in case you're wondering.

Nicely played France

 

Things I learned lately 16 Feb

• Word on the street is that GPT-5 is starting its training phase now.
• Apparently GPT-4 can see right through your typos. Don’t even bother wasting time correcting them.
• If you order a replacement credit card from RBC online, the minute you execute the order, they disable your physical card. Thankfully you are warned of this, but not very aggressively. If you call their customer service number and order a replacement card, they let you use the original card until the replacement is activated. Considering that most seniors would always use the physical card and not an electronic wallet app, the online process is a bit ageist. Update: They lied. The card is dead.
• St-Hubert, a restaurant that sells barbecue chicken, got started in Montreal in 1951. In 1952, they started home delivery in a fleet of yellow Volkswagen Beetles. Swiss Chalet started in 1954 in Toronto, started by the son of the founder of Chalet BBQ of Montreal.
• A play bow is one of many unique canine behaviours and gestures dogs use to communicate. The play bow serves as an invitation to engage in playtime. It is a distinctive posture that a dog assumes by lowering their front end while keeping their rear end raised and is often accompanied by tail wagging.
• The makers of the old video game Command & Conquer remastered the game at a higher resolution and re-released it in 2020.
• Ruby Foo's Montreal started as a restaurant and later morphed into a hotel-restaurant à la Howard Johnson's. It is still running as a hotel. Ruby Foo’s actually started in Boston.
• Hertz also owns the Thrifty, Dollar, and Firefly car rental companies.

Chonkish

 

Small things 9 Feb

• Chevron CEO Mike Wirth and U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm both agreed that the shortage in refining capacity will persist and probably get even worse, as the country saw at least five refineries close in 2021 alone. "My personal view is there will never be another new refinery built on US soil. You’re looking at committing capital 10 years out, that will need decades to offer a return for shareholders, in a policy environment where governments around the world are saying, 'We don’t want these products.'" 
• Coffee. You can sleep when you’re dead.
• Apathy - If we don't take care of the customer, maybe they'll stop bugging us.
• The wind is like the air, only pushier.
• Some oxygen molecules help fires burn while others help make water, so it's brother against brother.
• Two wrongs don't make a right. But three rights do make a left.
• How many lightbulbs does it take for a person who can't tell a joke to screw it up?
• If an American wanted to be mean, they could say mean things like, an American team has won the Grey Cup more recently than a Canadian team has won the Stanley Cup.
• The problem with the gene pool is that there’s no lifeguard.

Lasso

 

Add an ‘L’ to a movie title to change the story

Blank Job

Despicable Mel

Lender’s Game

Flight Club

Lice Age

This is Lit

Crazy minion name

 

“You silly boy”

Imagine a duet featuring Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle. 

It exists. 

Take Me Home. 

Those voices.

Ess em eh are tee

 

Mission Beach to Pacific Beach via bike on the sand

This is the neighbourhood Darlene and I stay in in San Diego. We go as often as we can. Perhaps this video makes it clearer why that is. The tide is out in this video.

Watch it in the highest resolution for the best impact.

We decide

 

Things I learned lately 9 Feb

• GPT-3, the large language model released by openAI in 2020, was trained on 500 billion words, which would take someone reading 1000 words an hour over 1000 years.
• ChatGPT Plus is definitely worth the USD$20 per month. Night and day.
• The Bee Gees didn’t get involved with the movie until after filming was over. The dance scenes in Saturday Night Fever were being shot to Boz Scaggs and Stevie Wonder music.
  
  
  
• After Star Trek the original series was cancelled, an animated series was created that ran for two seasons and won an Emmy. It had the same writers. Much of the main cast returned to provide the voices. It created a controversy as some die-hard fans refused to recognize it as real Star Trek.
• In China’s Kubuqi desert, the Kubuqi Renewables Base, which once completed, will be roughly the size of 20 Central Parks, will supply 16GW of solar and wind power to over 20,000,000 homes. This is the centerpiece of a collection of 255 such bases China will build in its western and northern deserts. They could be looking at 455GW when that project is finished.
• The tallest chandelier in the world can be found in the lobby of the new Fairmont Raffles hotel in Doha Qatar.
• There are no traffic lights or sidewalks in Iqaluit, NU.
• It looks like Hyperloop is dead.
• Broccoli is not naturally occurring, but was bred from other types of cabbage.
• Leonard Nimoy (who played Spock) directed the movie Three Men and a Baby.
• 9,000 years ago, Great Britain was a peninsula of Europe   doggerland.png
• If you could travel at the speed of light, you would be able to circumnavigate the earth in 0.13 seconds.

Moon gift

 

Small things 1 Feb

• I’m really enjoying the apricity these days.
• Remember when we marched for things that really mattered, like human rights and equality for women?
• Dear car prowlers: If you’re going to break into my car, please break the windshield glass so I can get this rock-chipped, cracked one replaced for free. Thanks.
• "No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger than its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise." ~Marian Anderson
• Why doesn’t Dairy Queen have sugar cones?
• Ethernet (n): something used to catch the etherbunny.
• “What's a sesame seed grow into? I don't know, we never give them a chance. What the fuck is a sesame?! It's a street. It's a way to open shit.” ~Mitch Hedberg
• A vibration is an atom that can’t make up its mind which way it wants to go.
• When stumbling upon other guys watching a sporting event, you may always ask the score of the game in progress, but it is improper to ask who's playing.
• Johnny Depp starred in two movies with the word chocolate (in 2 languages) in the title.
• Every opinion now accepted was once eccentric, but not every eccentric opinion becomes accepted.
• Why is bra singular and panties plural?
• Gravity. It’s not just a good idea, it’s a law.
• Can a hearse carrying a corpse drive in the carpool lane?
• Things I can’t believe I got excited about back in the day: my Commodore Vic 20 computer; my Palm Tungsten; a video camera with hard drive storage; portable mp3 players; my 256MB thumb drive; my Garmin GPS; finishing an mp3 download over dial-up after 30 minutes.

I knew it was true

 

Fisker is now a viable player in EV

My YouTube feed has become inundated with videos by owners of the Fisker Ocean. 

I saw one do a Canadian road trip from Toronto to Calgary. 

I’ve watched one tackle the snow in the US. 

They are no match for Tesla in terms of their manufacturing prowess, but the early owners are thrilled with their purchases and cars are being shipped worldwide.

It looks like we finally have a new North American player in the house! 

Go Fisker.

Defective doggo

 

McRib is McMeh

I have tried the McRib so you don’t have to.

There is a reason why McDonalds takes this item off the menu for many years at a time. 

It’s so we forget how not great it is and convince ourselves that maybe it’s worth trying again.

Nope.

When you want to play but your dad is the Pink Floyd guy

 

Things I learned lately 1 Feb

• Record amounts of solar generation in Australia have driven electricity prices down, in some states as much as 50%.
• The Japanese have a love for all things ‘Western’ and that includes a love of things Texan. They even have Texas-themed honky-tonk bars. Everyone who goes to them dresses like Texans (or how they imagine that Texans dress).
• Prior to JFK’s assassination in 1963, TV networks only aired about 15 minutes of news as a requirement for an FCC broadcast license, all at a loss to the networks. The networks ran coverage of the assassination, the aftermath, and the funeral nonstop for days, with no ad breaks. That cost the networks millions of dollars in lost ad revenue, but it garnered them the public’s goodwill, and got folks to tune into the nightly news and other news shows that were gradually added. Over time, new news shows became profitable.
• Amazon expects to roll out 100,000 Rivian electric delivery vans in the US by 2030.
• If you’re in Redding California, you’re closer to Canada than you are to Mexico.
• If you’re in Birmingham Alabama, you’re closer to Canada than you are to Mexico.
• Carole King and Paul Simon met as students at Queens College in New York City.
  
  
  
• A man once faked his own kidnapping at his home by two masked gunmen because he wanted to go out drinking with his friends without his wife's permission. He returned home the next day and claimed that the kidnappers had let him go.
• Saturday Night Fever, released in 1977, was the first movie soundtrack that sold in massive quantities. Prior to Thriller by Michael Jackson, Saturday Night Fever was the best-selling album in music history. In the US, the album was certified 16× Platinum for shipments of at least 16 million units. The album stayed atop the charts for 24 straight weeks and stayed on Billboard's album charts for 120 weeks until March 1980. Three singles from the album reached No. 1 in the US.