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.

 

Tyson / Nye 2024

 

Told ya

 

Small things 26 Apr

• If an ideology doesn’t stand up to critical thought it doesn’t get a participation award. ~Shannon Leahy (in response to headline “Danielle Smith wants ideology 'balance' at universities. Alberta academics wonder what she's tilting at. Premier muses about new provincial research programs to produce more conservative thought.”)
• Do you like the sound of the band The Black Crowes? Then go check out the band that invented the sound in the 70s - Humble Pie.
• Shortest joke in the English language: "Pretentious? Moi?"
• A linguistics professor says during a lecture that, "In English, a double negative forms a positive. But in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, in no language in the world can a double positive form a negative." A voice from the back of the room pipes up, "Yeah, right."
• What does a dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac do at night? He stays up wondering if there really is a dog.
• Waldo as a horror film: “Find him… before he finds you.”
• I propose a new law, the “CEO Severance Cap” law. It would decree that CEOs cannot be given, on their departure, more than one month's salary for every year they were CEO for that company. So If a CEO made $5 million a year and had served for 3 years, they’d still get a tidy $1.25 million, but that’s it. No additional bonuses, share buyouts, nothing. If you’re let go with cause, all bets are off. You get nada.
• Just once I’m going to run out of IKEA into the parking lot yelling “Start the car! Start the car!”

The only handicap there's no cure for

 

Ian with two 'i's

 

Demand for gas has dropped

Here’s a graph showing how gasoline consumption in Canada has gone down since Covid. Although it has rebounded, it’s still nowhere near what it was in 2019. This is likely due to two major factors.

There are now more people working from home, at least part of the work week. And there are more electric cars on the road, with more being added every month.

Dear Tim’s: WANT

 

Wikipedia organized by community

Someone took the time to algorithmically organize wikipedia articles into communities, groups of articles more tightly linked to each other than to other articles in the rest of the network. 

He identified 28 distinct communities, which don’t seem to make much sense, but remember, they’re grouped by how much they link to each other.

1. Taxonomy

2. Notable 20th Century People

3. Politics & Law

4. United Kingdom

5. Music

6. American Cinema (and TV)

7. Football (Soccer)

8. Indian Cinema (and TV)

9. Athletics

10. Video Games

11. Space Objects

12. American Sports

13. Rugby

14 Canada & Hockey

15. Kurdistan

16. Korean Cinema (and TV)

17. Cricket

18. Motor Sports

19. Norwegian Politicians

20. Tennis

21. West Africa

22. Mexican Politicians

23. Combat Sports

24. Horse Racing

25. Golf

26. Chess

27. Figure Skating

28. Darts & Snooker

Do be do be do