Yes. Electrical Work. I’ve Turned Me On, You See

Consider this your occasional reminder that even on days when we don’t post anything new, there’s still something you can come here to read.

Every day, a new story from the archives of This is True is posted on this page. It changes every 24 hours, so bookmark it and make it part of whatever daily routine it is that makes you come here in the first place.

I bring it up today because the story, which dates back to 2005, is fantastically stupid. We missed out on it at the time, so this seemed like a good chance to right that wrong.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you car thief, home invader, armed robber, rapist and absolute fool Anthony Roberts.

A rapist who attacked a woman at gunpoint was captured when he forced his victim to write him a check in his own name and then tried to cash it, police said.
Officers said they arrested Anthony R. Roberts, 25, of Hialeah, on Wednesday night, minutes after he left the woman’s apartment as he tried to cash the $1,400 check. He had told the victim to write in the memo line that the check was for electrical work.

The cheque, of course, had his real name on it, which helped the investigation along. Also helpful was a clerk at the nearby cheque cashing store who was suspicious enough to call the victim’s phone number to ask questions while the police were on scene.

Roberts was arrested after a brief chase. He confessed to the robbery but denied the rape.

He was convicted and later lost an appeal. As best I can tell, he’s still in prison.

That’s Not Why They Call It A Flyover

Puslinch man accused of bribing officer after suspected impaired driving
I don’t know how much he offered them, but perhaps they should have taken it. The OPP will need all the cash it can get when it inevitably gets sued by everyone impacted by the accidents at the flyover.

The flyover on Highway 7/8 was plowed and salted in the hours between two vehicles launching off snow embankments and on to the road below, says OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt.
The OPP were called to two incidents Monday morning — one of them fatal — involving vehicles hitting snow banked onto the side of the flyover by snowplows, plunging over the side, and onto their roofs.
“The lanes themselves had been plowed, had been salted. It’s an elevated platform, and you need drivers to drive through the conditions. They’re preventable crashes. The road conditions and the weather conditions don’t cause crashes. It’s poor driving in those conditions that causes that,” Schmidt said.

The first crash, at about 2 a.m., involved a taxi driver, who went over the embankment near the end of the flyover and flipped onto Highway 8.
The driver was taken to Hamilton General Hospital with minor injuries and was later released from hospital.
Five and a half hours later, a 38-year-old Waterloo woman drove her RAV 4 Hybrid up a snow embankment, before dropping near King Street East below. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

“It comes down to driver error as well, with driving too fast for conditions, losing control,” Schmidt said, adding it’s a tragedy what happened to the woman.
“I don’t want to just blame it on the driver. But the lanes actually were in good shape.”

“The conditions to close a road would be when the roads are impassable, and this was certainly not the case. Traffic was driving on it all night and throughout the weekend until these two people lost control in the snow and ramped off the snowbank,” he said.
Schmidt noted the first crash, involving the taxi driver, can be credited to human error as well.
“If you drive on the shoulder and you lose control, it’s got to be driver error. Unless there’s a mechanical error, unless there’s something else. But the roads were plowed. Everything was looking good,” he said.

I agree that plenty of people have no idea how to drive in the winter. I’ve had the misfortune of being in cars with some of them. And yes, snowbanks on the sides of highways and whatnot aren’t uncommon. But to just come straight out and say that multiple people launching themselves to their doom on the same stretch of road just a few hours apart was absolutely 100% driver error, no question about it before there could be any real investigation? You’d better have your ducks in a row before you make a statement like that, my man.

I don’t always have the best memory, so maybe it doesn’t mean a whole lot that I can’t recall the last time I heard about someone driving off of that thing. And were it just one, maybe we could write it off as human error and move on with our lives. But two? That’s a pretty big coincidence, and one dismissive statement isn’t going to convince me or many others that there couldn’t have been anything else wrong up there.

This Program Is Brought To You By This And This And This And This And This And This And This And Don’t Even Think About Looking Away

We’ll give you a 55 inch smart TV for free sounds like an offer that no one in his right mind would refuse. But this one? Hard pass from this guy.

This is the future of TV, according to Telly, a company that offers a free TV in exchange for the privilege of constantly blaring ads in your face. It puts the ads in a 10-inch-wide “smart” display that sits just below a built-in sound bar and runs the entire length of the TV. The screen stays on at all times — while you watch shows, movies, YouTube videos, and play video games. Even when you turn off the TV with a tap of the remote’s power button, the secondary screen remains illuminated. It will only turn off if you hold the power button for three seconds.

Despite my attempts to tune out the lower display, video ads and moving widgets draw my eyes in. Along with displaying the date, time, and current weather conditions, it shows a constant stream of headlines in a news ticker, plus stock prices and even links to news stories from outlets like Fox News, which you can click into and read on the top screen. You can remove or add widgets, but there’s no way to get rid of the ad on the right side that refreshes every so often. Under Telly’s terms of service, you can’t cover up the display. Even if you tried, it just wouldn’t be practical, since you need the secondary screen to navigate to different apps and control inputs.

Ahh yes, those terms of service. Time to get strangled to death by all the attached strings. Just listen to this horseshit.

To reserve a Telly, you must agree to use the device as the main TV in your home, constantly keep it connected to the internet, and regularly watch it. If the company finds that you violate these rules, Telly will ask you to return the TV (and charge a $1,000 fee if you don’t send it back).

The TV also comes with a built-in camera with a privacy shutter and a microphone. The company’s terms of service state that it “may collect information about the audio and video content you watch, the channels you view, and the duration of your viewing sessions,” as well as detect the “physical presence of you and any other individuals using the TV at any given time.”

I realize that even regular smart TVs are kind of gross and spy happy, but they also won’t set you back anywhere near $1000 and won’t extort you if you aren’t sufficiently obedient to them. You would have to be a fool to allow this predatory garbage into your home.

The More Things Change…


YouTube threw this at me today, and I watched it, because it’s Carlin. I’ve heard all of it before (lots of it more than once), but I still hung on every word because even though he’s been dead for nearly 20 years and these bits are mostly much older than that, it’s astounding how relevant most of it is to our current times. Abortion, religion, business criminals, political criminals, war, eroding rights. The names may change, but the big picture problems never do. There are days when it feels like we’ve come a long way as a society, and then there are days when you watch something like this for 40 minutes and wonder have we really? I’ve seen a lot of progress in my lifetime, but what does it all mean if a band of evil, nakedly corrupt grifters with no regard for any of it can just come and take it away, laws be damned? It’s no fun to think of our rights as privileges, but if we don’t protect them, that’s exactly what they are.

He Doesn’t Sound Much Smarter This Way, Either


This would be so much funnier if the moron wasn’t currently in the midst of egging on world war 3, but listening to Hank Azaria read Donald Trump quotes in the voices of his various Simpsons characters is still awfully, awfully great. Moe, Chief Wiggum, Professor Frink, Superintendent Chalmers, Cletus, Dr. Nick, Disco Stu, Snake, the Sea Captain and Kirk Van Houten all get a crack at making him sound anything like a normal person. Definitely worth the nine minutes.

He Deserves The Piece Prize, Not The Peace Prize


I feel indescribably horrible for this woman. Handing over one of the highest honours a person can achieve in a lifetime to a self-obsessed, miserable manbaby who by no objective, reality-based measure deserves to be within 10000 miles of it in the hopes that it will appease him sufficiently that he will allow you even the smallest bit of influence over the fate of a country that belongs to you but not him is a feeling I hope never to fully comprehend. It’s an act that feels at once impossibly honourable yet impossibly disappointing.

The talk of historical mutual respect between the two countries is a nice story that I hope helps her rest a little easier at night, but anyone who knows even the slightest bit about Donald Trump is well aware that it’s nothing more than that. Where Trump is concerned, there’s no such thing as mutual respect. Loyalty is a 1-way street. The moment you’ve outlived your usefulness or should you dare to come up for air without permission while you’re supposed to be tonguing his derriere, you’re dead to him. He is, has always been, and will only ever be out for one person. And that person ain’t you, María.

The US president has declined to endorse Machado as Venezuela’s new leader, despite her movement claiming victory in 2024’s widely contested elections.
Trump has instead been dealing with the acting head of state in Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former vice-president.
But he said meeting Machado was a “great honor”, calling her a “wonderful woman who has been through so much”.
After leaving the White House, Machado spoke to supporters gathered at the gates outside, telling them in Spanish, according to the Associated Press: “We can count on President Trump.”
“I presented the president of the United States the medal of the Nobel Peace Prize,” Machado later told journalists in English, calling it “a recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom”.

Trump, who often speaks about his desire to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, had expressed displeasure when it was given to Machado and she decided to accept the honour last year.

In her remarks, Machado described how the Marquis de Lafayette, who fought in America’s Revolutionary War, gave a medal bearing the likeness of George Washington to Simon Bolivar, one of the founding fathers of modern Venezuela.
The gift was “a sign of the brotherhood” between her country and the US “in their fight for freedom against tyranny,” Machado said.
“And 200 years in history, the people of Bolivar are giving back to the heir of Washington a medal – in this case a medal of the Nobel Peace Prize – as a recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom,” she said.

Every Band You Pay

I realize that I’m maybe super mega oversimplifying things here, but goddamn is it ever stupid that bands fight over songwriting credits.

I was in a band once. I’ve also pitched in here and there to help my musical friends with things they’ve written. Most of that stuff never wound up getting released, and anything that did never made the sort of money that would make it worthwhile to shake a sumbitch down and potentially ruin a friendship if it made anything at all. But the fact is, I did contribute. A line here, a harmony there, a what if this bit sounded more like this instead…that sort of collaborative tinkering adds up and becomes part of making a song what it is. Sometimes an offhand suggestion can mean the difference between just another song and a monster hit that brings in millions of dollars a year and pretty well sets you up for life.

So unless the dynamics of your band are such that whatever your leader brings you is exactly what you play no questions asked, why doesn’t it just go without saying that everyone gets a piece of the action? It would make things so much easier. Yes, you’re still left with the question of what’s worth what if for some reason an equal partnership is off the table, but you’re at least starting from a place where everyone’s contribution is worth something, which feels like the right thing to do when you’re all supposed to be in something together.

I’m thinking about this today because I was just reminded that Andy Summers didn’t get a writing credit for “Every Breath You Take”.

that instantly recognizable guitar? That’s his. Yes, Sting had things mostly nailed down in the demo he recorded, but come on, man.

Maybe it would have done well anyway. Sometimes a hit is a hit no matter what. But I’m not convinced it would have been nearly as big as it became if it had come out sounding like that.

The moral of the story is, if ya didn’t do it alone, don’t act like ya did. You’ll look like much less of a dickhead than you would if you were to, let’s say, argue that the guys who helped make your music sound as good as it does were substantially overpaid.