What’s He Doing Here? Am I Hallucinating?

AI of dead Arizona road rage victim addresses killer in court
Listen. If this is truly something that this guy would have wanted and it helped his family deal with their loss, more power to them. But I’m telling you right now. If I die and any of you does this to me, I’m visiting everyone you know so I can talk them into killing you. It’s ridiculous enough that people will pay real money to watch a hologram of some dead guy perform a concert. Bringing that but creepier into a courtroom? The irritation with which that thought fills me is enough to give even the dead version of myself a coronary. It feels like we’ve gone way too far.

I don’t mind that AI exists, but I’m sick of having it jammed down our throats and into every other place it doesn’t belong, especially when we don’t even really have a clue what it’s good for or good at or what the implications might be. I don’t want to talk to it for customer service, because if I’m resorting to calling customer service, my problem is probably kind of weird and specific. I don’t want to listen to it on the radio or narrating my audiobooks, because that stuff is art. I don’t want it writing the news or much of anything else, because its writing tends to be flat and terrible. My writing is also terrible, but at least I’m putting my heart and mind into sucking this bad. I just wish we would slow down and consider all of this instead of doing a bunch of shit no one asked for and nobody needs simply because we can. We won’t, but it would be nice.

Chris Pelkey was killed in a road rage shooting in Chandler, Arizona, in 2021.
Three and a half years later, Pelkey appeared in an Arizona court to address his killer. Sort of.
“To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” says a video recording of Pelkey. “In another life, we probably could have been friends.
“I believe in forgiveness, and a God who forgives. I always have, and I still do,” Pelkey continues, wearing a grey baseball cap and sporting the same thick red and brown beard he wore in life.

Pelkey’s appearance from beyond the grave was made possible by artificial intelligence in what could be the first use of AI to deliver a victim impact statement. Stacey Wales, Pelkey’s sister, told local outlet ABC-15 that she had a recurring thought when gathering more than 40 impact statements from Chris’s family and friends.
“All I kept coming back to was, what would Chris say?” Wales said.

Wales and her husband fed an AI model videos and audio of Pelkey to try to come up with a rendering that would match the sentiments and thoughts of a still-alive Pelkey, something that Wales compared with a “Frankenstein of love” to local outlet Fox 10.

I’m In Fear For His Wife’s Safety, Too

Woman Accidentally Goes to Wrong House, Resident Shoots at Her 17 Times — and Then Explains Why: Police
Stories like these make me happy to be a Canadian. Not because I don’t think something like it could happen here, but because the chances of it are a lot slimmer seeing as we have a few billion less guns freely floating around and most of us tend to be a lot less insane in general.

The woman said she walked up the driveway and realized she was at the wrong address, at which point she claimed Rawicki grabbed her arm and wrist, “restraining her by holding her arm behind her back in an arm lock, against her will,” the affidavit alleges. The woman, identified as TP in the affidavit, was able to call the person, identified as WP, whom she had been following, according to the affidavit, which says WP ran to her aid.
Rawicki then threw the woman to the ground and retrieved a firearm that he fired multiple times in the direction of the two individuals, who had just gotten into the woman’s vehicle, the affidavit alleges. They told police that the vehicle was hit multiple times. According to the report, a total of 17 shell casings were found in front of the home.

Rawicki told police that he believed the woman was a sex worker and that he attacked her out of fear for his wife’s safety, the affidavit states. Police said they recovered video footage that showed the woman approaching the residence in “a non-threatening manner before the attack.”

I’ve walked up a few wrong driveways in my time. When you’re blind, it happens. Once in a great while someone gets a little weird about it, but it’s never turned into anything beyond sorry about that or oops, that’s embarrassing. The most I generally have to think about it is hoping that nobody’s home and watching my dumb ass through the window. I just figure it out and get on my way. It’s never crossed my mind that things could escalate like that, and I hope it never does.

But speaking of embarrassing, 17 shots and nobody was hurt? That’s undeniably a good thing, but dude. Pretty sure even my blind ass could at least graze somebody in 17 tries.

And did they identify the victim as TP because those are her initials or because she reacted similarly to how I know I would have had it been me on the wrong end of this madness?

But Is His Woodworking?

The Score did a fun (depending on your perspective at least) little roundup of some of the stranger injuries in sports. I wasn’t sure whether or not I was going to post it, but then this happened.

Bryce Mitchell (2018)
Don’t stick a power drill in your pocket: That’s the lesson UFC fighter Mitchell learned while doing some woodwork. Mitchell was sizing up a wooden board when the drill in his pocket turned on and ripped his scrotum in half. Safe to say “Thug Nasty” wasn’t back in the Octagon – or the gym – for a little while after that one.

Oh my lord and baby jesus! How do I have no recollection of this? Repressed memory?

I Need A Drink. If Only I Knew What I Wanted. Perhaps A Cup Of Tea

Sometimes things are funny because they’re true, like this video here.

Whenever I flip by a new country station or don’t have control of the radio, all I ever seem to hear is what sounds like the same two or three dudes singing the same song about beer, jeans, trucks and gravel roads. And the song isn’t even any good! I don’t need all of my music to be super deep or even particularly interesting, but for god’s sake, you’re allowed to sing about more than one thing. You like to party on Saturday? Fantastic! I occasionally do too! But there are six other days in the damn week during which things also occur. Have you honestly nothing to say about any of them?

I know the stuff sells, but so does a lot of crap. Country is capable of so much better, but it seems like it would rather just pander and try desperately to be pop music.

Wait, did somebody say pander?

the Following Goofy Sponsorships Are Brought To You By…

Every bit of a sports broadcast is sponsored. Penalty kills, powerplays, calls to the bullpen, the broadcast booth…I’m used to that. But hearing on a Bluebombers game the other day that “Doug Brown’s colour commentary is brought to you buy…,” that was a new one. Caught me off guard so much that I immediately forgot who was bringing it.

And while we’re talking sponsorships and broadcast booths, a big shoutout to Carin’s favourite by way of the Kitchener Rangers.

“We’re here in the David Schooley broker with Remax Twin City broadcast booth, the negotiator gets it done.”

She can’t believe they have to spit that ridiculous word soup out every time they say where they are. She’ll get no argument from me. It really does sound kinda silly.

That’s Not What Mugshot Means, Sir

It’s been a while since a story not about Donald Trump has made me scream out loud, but dear god, this one sure did.

According to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, 51-year-old Walter Frymire was arrested after deputies received a call regarding a naked man inside a bathroom at a public park.
Sheriff Grady Judd said once deputies arrived on the scene, they found Frymire with all of his clothes on, and trespassed him from the park.
“We’re nice. We send him out of the park, and trespass him, and tell him we’re not going to arrest you even though people saw you here without any clothes on. We’re going to give you a break,” Sheriff Judd said.

That break didn’t last long, as Frymire was soon caught trespassing on other property nearby and arrested. According to the sheriff, Frymire was found to be in possession of meth at that point. Meth, and something else that meth could probably at least partially explain.

Sheriff Judd said Frymire was put through an X-ray scan to check for firearms and drugs, which led to a startling discovery.
“He brought a Thermus into the jail. That’s right. He put it up the exit ramp. You know what I mean?” Sheriff Judd says in the video while displaying a beverage container. “No, it wasn’t this one.”

“He said, ‘well, I put that inside my body.’ And he didn’t swallow it 24 hours earlier.”

An image of Walter Frymire's prison body scan, showing a metallic object in a place where one would generally hope not to find a metallic object.
Anyone for a beverage? I brought chocolate milk!

I ran that photo through one of those AI image describers hoping that it could help me with some good alt text or otherwise give me some kind of inspiration for where to take this post other than the obvious places, such as the hospital to which Frymire had to be taken in order to undergo a removal procedure. He’ll be ok, best I can tell.

But anyway, I asked the thing twice, and it swears that what’s stuck in there appears to be a mobile phone. I’ve used plenty of thermoses and mobile phones in my time, and I’ve never seen one that looks like the other. So how smart is this AI stuff, really? Like you’re seriously going to tell me that they train these models by sweeping up the entire contents of the internet and yet none of them are experts in what’s up someone’s ass? That’s literally what half the internet exists for. Colour me unimpressed. With the AI, at least. I find myself strangely awed by Mr. Frymire.

Aaaaaaa! Warm Sleep!

I would have had no idea that anything had gone wrong had I not read about it in the news, but this week’s big Amazon Web Services outage most definitely affected a whole lot of others. This is, I’m sure we can all agree, very bad.

But there’s one aspect of it that has me personally feeling downright gleeful.

Among those impacted were the dinguses who bought those stupid smart beds I wrote about in June.

On Monday, users of Eight Sleep’s “Pod” mattress toppers – a near $2,000, three-layer mattress, that according to the company can be customized to “achieve the perfect mix of temperature control and comfort”- took to X and Reddit to voice their frustrations.
“I need to change the alarm in the morning, but the app won’t open. Tried restarting and even tried logging in on iPad, and won’t log in,” a Reddit User shared. “I feel like I’m held hostage to their app not working. I have no way to change the alarm now. Wtf?”
Another Sleep Eight user shared that their “girlfriend’s side of the bed set itself to 110 f and won’t turn down. Nightmare.”
CEO of Eight Sleep Matteo Franceschetti acknowledged the frustrations in an X post Monday evening.
“That is not the experience we want to provide, and I want to apologize for it.”

And then the company announced this, which is truly the mark of a detail oriented organization that unquestionably has every last bit of its shit together.

Franceschetti followed the apology with a promise to restore “all the features as AWS comes back,” and a commitment to “outage-proofing your Pod experience,” a process he said Eight Sleep would be working “the whole night+24/7,” to build so that the problem is “fixed extremely quickly.”
The company’s co-founder Alexandra Zatarain told the The Verge that shipments of the new “outage mode” began on Tuesday, allowing “the app to communicate with Pod devices over Bluetooth when cloud infrastructure is unavailable.”
“During an outage, you’ll still be able to open the app, turn the Pod on/off, change temperature levels, and flatten the base,” Zatarain told The Verge.

I seriously cannot believe this, even though I simultaneously oh so totally can.

Nobody, from conceptualization to construction to marketing to consumer, ever bothered asking “hey, what happens if the internet goes down”?

Great work all around, everyone. You all deserve every bit of your shitty week.

In Which I Use Pierre Poilievre To Teach An Important Lesson

I don’t have a clue what Pierre Poilievre looks like, but jesus christ, that voice!

Gaaaaah!

Every time I hear him talk, there are two thoughts I can’t shake:

  1. Even if we agreed on every issue in the world, I’d still want to slap the crap out of him.
  2. If you told me a guy who sounds like that has stacks of Rubbermaids full of stolen underwear in his basement or at least one person buried in his back yard, I’d probably believe you. Dude is just so…weird!

I’m glad to get that out in the open. Not just because dunking on this clown is a righteous pursuit, but because I want you to remember this post the next time some goober tells you that because blind people can’t see, that they are forced to look deeper rather than being superficial like so much of the world. I assure you, we can be superficial as hell. But like most other things in life, we just have to do it a little differently.

Some Things I Wrote Down

I thought I was finally starting to get a bit better at the posting thing again, but I’ve hit another wall, it seems. So maybe I’ll try jotting some stuff down and posting it when it feels right. Making myself do this in the usual ways hasn’t worked in years, so maybe this will. It’ll be like Twitter, but all at once and I’m the only shithead.

  • Some of you know us so have an idea of what I’m on about when I mention not being able to write, but for the benefit of everyone else, I’ll lay a couple of recent happenings on you.
    • Over the summer, I lost my grandpa. Someday I hope to write a whole post about that, but I don’t know when that day might be. I’m having a horrible time getting started, and once I do start, I’m not sure I’ll know where to stop. His house was like a second home to us, and in some ways he was much more a dad to me than my actual dad. I have so many memories, and it’s been extremely hard to settle them down enough to form them into something coherent. If I’m being honest, I don’t think I’m close to ready for it yet. I’m sure it’ll feel good when I am, but for now I feel better experiencing it with people I love when I have to than talking at a world full of strangers about it. He was such a presence in all of our lives, and we’re still figuring out how to move on without it. Slowly but surely we are, but it’s especially difficult when you’re just starting to learn what it’s like to live through some of his favourite things without him. We got to spend a year longer with him than we thought we would, which is a blessing and a curse. The blessing part is obvious, but to call that year a struggle would be so charitable of me that I should probably get a tax receipt for it. the feeling of watching the clock run out on someone with no idea when it’s going to hit 0 is damn near indescribable and not something I would wish on almost anyone.
    • Then, a couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a friend I hadn’t heard from in a while. Because those sorts of things don’t happen for fun reasons a whole lot these days, the news she had was that one of our mutual friends had died of cancer. From what I was told, he didn’t want many people to know he was going through it or how bad it was. Knowing him, that sounds about right. The two of us didn’t talk much in later years beyond a how’s it going or a here’s something funny now and then, but we had a lot of fun together back in the day. We were constantly cracking each other up with just the dumbest shit. Sometimes it was even fit for public consumption, like the Bob and Harry announcements we did to promote our school’s staff vs. student hockey game. We were in a band together. No disrespect intended to the rest of us, but he was easily the most talented guy in that thing. If there was a style he couldn’t drum at least decently, I don’t remember it. He was a pretty good cook, too. He loved sports more than anyone I’ve ever met. I’m not sure it would be much of an exaggeration to say that he knew things about sports that I didn’t even know were sports. We didn’t always see eye to eye on certain things, which is, at least from my side, why we wound up slowly drifting apart. There was never a big blowup and I never held a grudge, which is comforting now given how things turned out and how hard it hit me. I’ll miss ya, buddy.
    • I could keep on with this theme, but naah. I know Carin is trying to write something of her own about it, so I’ll let her take it from here. But she’s kinda in my boat. Words are hard when life isn’t always into letting up.
  • Good things do still happen to us sometimes, though. Over the summer we got to see Weird Al in Toronto. I don’t have many dream concerts, but that was definitely one, and it was everything I could have hoped for. If you were to ask me to complain about anything it would be that some of the songs I hoped to hear in full ended up crammed into a medley, but when you have that much material there’s no way to get it all in. But what an amazing, funny, energetic night. So good I didn’t even mind the rain, and I haaaaaaate getting rained on.
  • And in the last couple of weeks we also saw Honeymoon Suite and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Really enjoyed both, but I think as the years go by the Dirt Band will stick with me more. I don’t know what I was expecting going in, but whatever it was, they blew it away.
  • We’ve got plans to hit a bunch more shows before the year is out and even a few lined up for 2026. I don’t know when exactly we got back to thinking about these things in terms of that would be fun instead of are we sure we have the energy or the mood for that, but it’s nice.
  • I still can’t frigging believe that the Jays are going to the World Series. You wana talk about blowing away expectations? That’s it, right there. When the season started I expected nothing beyond that it would be spring and then summertime, because that’s how orbit works. But Blue Jays baseball any more meaningful than baseball in general is when you’re a fan and you like to relax to it? Forget it. And yet, here we are.

    I’ll admit I was worried when I heard that Vlad showed up at the dome in Leafs gear. I do my best not to be the superstitious type, but Leafs in game seven hasn’t exactly given off the I’m a winner vibe in like 20 years. But again, here we are. I’m still not sure if John Schneider has his head all the way around how to properly manage a pitching staff, but yup, you guessed it, here we are. If you’re looking for a prediction, I don’t have one. My head says the Dodgers are going to kill us, but of course my heart disagrees. It might even be starting to convince my head, because why not? What else about this Jays season has made any damn sense? I mean, here we are! Let’s fuckin goooooo!

  • Jansen Visconti does not sound like a person’s name. Jansen Visconti sounds like a cheap wine that someone who doesn’t drink wine finds in the back of a cupboard and serves at Christmas dinner.
  • On the subject of names, does anyone in Canadian politics at the moment have a more fun one to say out loud than Gary Anandasangaree? He sounds like he should be the main character in an Irish Rovers song. Seriously, picture it over anything that sounds vaguely like this and tell me I’m wrong.

    🎵Gary Anandasangaree comes rollin’ through the bay. And when we see asangaree we stop and shout hurray! ‘Cause everyone here is out of beer and backed up on their pay, but Gary Anandasangaree has come to save the day!🎵

And now that I’ve hopefully put a song in all your heads, I’ll leave things there.

That went ok, I think. Maybe I’ll try it again. Who knows? The world is nutty sometimes, you guys. Just do the best you can out there.

Is Somebody Scamming?

It’s crazy enough that this scam worked once, but now it’s worked twice, and on women in the same country, no less!

A Japanese octogenarian was swindled out of thousands of dollars after falling in love online with a self-described astronaut who sought her help to avert a spaceship crisis, police said Tuesday.
The hapless woman in Japan’s northern Hokkaido island met the fraudster in July on social media who claimed to be a male astronaut, a local police officer told AFP, describing the case as a romance scam.
After some exchanges, the scammer one day told her he was “in space on a spaceship right now” but was “under attack and in need of oxygen,” the official said.
The scammer then urged her to pay him online to help him buy oxygen, and successfully hoodwinked around 1 million yen ($6,700) out of her.

Thanks to Carin for suggesting the title and soundtrack after the first one. It doesn’t fit quite as perfectly this time, but better late than never.