by Steve Wettlaufer -

How Else Are They Supposed To Teach Him The Value Of Hard Work?

Phoenix mom accused of punching 7-year-old for failing job as lookout while grandma shoplifted at Walmart

Phoenix police officers arrested a mother on suspicion of punching her 7-year-old son in the mouth because he didn’t do a good enough job as a lookout while his grandmother shoplifted at a Walmart store, according to Maricopa County court documents.

Officers observed the child walk out of the store to the parking lot with his mother, identified as Rebecca Gonzales, 27, where she began “spanking (him), then slapping him and finally punching him in the face,” documents said.

Police spoke to the boy, who they said was bleeding from the mouth. He told them that “he was hit because he didn’t watch out for his grandma good enough,” according to court filings.

The name and whereabouts of grandma haven’t been reported anywhere, so we don’t know if she’s been charged with anything or if she needs to sock her daughter in the yap for making an unnecessary scene.

If she does, she’ll need to wait until somebody puts up the $2500 bond to get Rebecca out of jail, where she was sent after being charged with a count of aggravated assault.

by Steve Wettlaufer -

Why Didn’t Someone Tell Me Two-Bagger Wasn’t An Insult?

I’m not sure if this fella has been arrested yet, but it likely won’t be long before his poor planning comes back to bite him if not.

Just before 8.30pm the man walked into the store on Lower King Street, Caboolture, with the bag on his head and threatened the female attendant with a knife.
The staff member complied, handing him cash and cigarettes, which he placed in the bag after removing it from his head.

Yes, he was caught on camera. You can see those images at the link above. Be sure to call police if you recognize him, or to laugh in his exposed face if you’re reading this from prison and he happens to be sitting nearby.

by Steve Wettlaufer -

More Like All Wet

This one’s appropriate on a couple of levels.

Recently arrested and charged with felony video voyeurism of someone at least 19 years old after a hidden camera was discovered recording people showering in his bathroom is Jonathan Moist.

According to the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, Moist’s niece and her friend who were housesitting for Moist discovered the hidden camera in November.
“He had a hidden camera in his bathroom that videoed an adult female in the shower,” said Brevard County sheriff’s spokesman Tod Goodyear, who added that the victim is the friend of Moist’s niece.
The niece and victim removed the device and took it to the girl’s mother, who lives in Cocoa, according to the Sheriff’s Office. A sheriff’s report says they removed an SD card from the device, plugged it into a computer and observed several videos of people in Moist’s bathroom, including some in the shower.

by Steve Wettlaufer -

Please Don’t Fake Vacations To Impress Your Fake Friends

It almost makes me want to cry that I have to tell adults this, but I suppose this is where we are now.

It’s nice that you want people to have a high opinion of you. To a degree, you should. Life is somewhat easier when people actually like you. But if you’ve gotten to a point where you’re worried that those around you are going to think less of you because you can’t go on glamorous trips or don’t have all of the newest, fanciest crap, you maybe need some therapy, and you definitely need better friends and a whole lot less social media. Image-obsessed people are faking vacations with professional photo editing

Looking to live the glamorous, well-traveled life, and stir envy among your Instagram followers, but can’t afford it? Well now you can have a photo of yourself digitally altered to make it seem like you can.
A Nebraska-based photo-editing service named Fake A Vacation lets users send in snapshots to have them superimposed onto fake backgrounds. Options include a sandy beach in Maui, the rushing waters of Niagara Falls, even the Grand Canyon at sunset.
It may seem like a joke service, but lying about travel is a far more common practice than you may think.

According to a study released Wednesday that surveyed over 4,000 American adults over 18, flight cost-comparison Jetcost concluded that 14 percent of respondents fibbed to others about their flashy vacations. Ten percent of that pool even went the extra mile to post a fake on social media.

The reason? Participants claimed they felt embarrassed and wanted to impress others — such as the parents of their friends or partners, and colleagues.
But there are other reasons.
“They fake it … sometimes because the actual vacation is too expensive, so they plan this way or sometimes they do it to get others envious,” says Tom Eda, who leads marketing and support for Fake A Vacation, adding that others have purchased faux vacation pics because they had to cancel their trip last-minute.

by Steve Wettlaufer -

How The Ontario Government Can Better Tackle The Flooding Issue: An In Depth Report

Ontario creating task force to improve flooding resilience

As a good and helpful citizen of the province of Ontario, I have taken it upon myself to compile a list of recommendations in hopes of helping to solve this growing problem. It is as follows:

  1. Don’t gut the funding for all of the flood management programs and the experts who run them, ya fuckin’ tool belts.
  2. Quit wasting thousands of man hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting against a federal government that’s actually trying to take legitimate steps to fix the problem. People need more than the disingenuous bloviating you goofs have been offering.

You’re welcome. Now go put the money where it’s needed instead of wasting it on high priced consultants that we’re probably going to eventually find out you’re friends with.

Ontario is creating a task force on improving the province’s resilience to flooding, following high water levels this spring in several communities.
Premier Doug Ford and Natural Resources Minister John Yakabuski said in a statement that the government will work to better plan for and reduce the impacts of flooding.
“Over the past couple of weeks, we have seen first-hand the devastating effect of flooding on our communities,” they said in the statement Friday. “The people of Ontario can’t go through this every year. Something needs to change.”

by Steve Wettlaufer -

Ford Government Says Sensible Thing

A promise from the Doug Ford government is about as useful as a marzipan dildo so we’ll see where this goes, but for now, because I am nothing if not a fair man, I’ll give them credit for the way they’re handling this one publicly. Ford pledges not to re-open abortion debate after 3 MPPs speak at anti-abortion rally

Yes the statement is riddled with the usual slogans and claptrap, but if you can get passed that it’s actually quite reasonable given how we know Ford feels personally about abortion and how he tends to deal with things he doesn’t like.

After 1 p.m., his office issued a statement saying his government “will not re-open the abortion debate.”
“The Ontario PC Party is a big-tent. We welcome members from a wide variety of backgrounds and beliefs. Our government is focused on protecting what matters most, cleaning up a fiscal mess left behind by the Liberals, making Ontario open for business and open for jobs, and lowering taxes for families.”

Hardly revolutionary and definitely politically smart especially given all of the pushback they’re getting on many of their service and funding cuts lately, but still a nice and unexpected deviation from the if something is good make it bad and if it’s bad make it worse strategy they generally employ.

It doesn’t even bother me that Ford didn’t “denounce his MPPs’ dangerous, anti-choice and anti-women position” as the NDP wants him to. Women and like-minded men are smart enough to see that for themselves and vote accordingly if that’s how they feel. But even more importantly than that, not denouncing those beliefs is the right thing for him to do. Were he to come out and slap his MPPs on the wrists for what they said, it would be absolutely hollow and dishonest.

At various times since entering Ontario politics, Ford has made comments about abortion and how it is governed.
During the 2018 leadership campaign, he questioned why a teenage girl seeking an abortion could obtain one without the consent of her parents, comparing it to other activities teens need parental consent for, such as a school field trip.
He told the anti-abortion news website Right Now that he was “personally pro-life” but that “all Canadians have to make this decision based on their own conscience and beliefs.”
He told the Campaign for Life Coalition he opposed the previous Liberal government’s so-called “bubble zone” restrictions on protesting outside locations that provide abortion services.

Is that really the guy you want coming out and saying “abortion bad”?

A strong opposition is a good thing. Opposing for the sake of opposing often isn’t.

by Steve Wettlaufer -

Diamonds And Buns

Obviously the main story here is that this fella had 44 diamonds stuffed into his jewelry can, but it maybe shouldn’t be overlooked that he was riding a motorcycle at the time. That cannot have been comfortable.

Twenty-three-year-old Eusebio Padilla was arrested on charges including receiving stolen property and tampering with evidence after what began as a routine traffic stop on April 7. Police pulled him over for allegedly riding a motorcycle without a license plate.

Police said they spotted a knife on Padilla and patted him down. He was caught attempting to remove “a baggy” from his rear at some point during the traffic stop, according to a criminal complaint filed in Albuquerque’s Metropolitan Court.
Police said they found 44 diamonds inside the bag recovered from Padilla’s rectum. The man allegedly told officers that he obtained the jewels from his uncle who “usually has stolen items,” KOB 4 reported.

Yup, he received that stolen property, all right.

Police say that Padilla’s plan was to eventually trade the diamonds for drugs. Assuming they’re not fakes, how did he plan to get a stash that size home on a motorcycle?

Oh. Right.

by Steve Wettlaufer -

So Long Wroute, We Hardly Knew Ye

I worried about this when it launched and eventually they started worrying about it too, but in the end, there was no saving it.

Transportation company Wroute Inc. has suspended all operations in the face of lower than anticipated ridership.
“Essentially it became apparent that the marketplace was just not present,” president Jason Hammond said Friday. Thursday was the eight-month-old company’s last day of service.

“In the end, while we had some dedicated regulars, we did not have the volume of passengers necessary to allow the company to be financially viable in the long term,” Hammond said.

Hammond said he believed that the number of people travelling between Waterloo Region, Guelph and beyond on a daily basis — coupled with the fact that schedules for intercity public transportation can be infrequent or not ideal — meant Wroute’s scheduled service would meet a need.
And that’s why the struggle to grow ridership came as a bit of a surprise, he said. “That was a known problem we were looking to solve.”

I don’t know what the sweet spot for frequency actually is, and the changing nature of work schedules is going to make that even harder to sort out over time. Obviously right now you can still hit the regular morning and afternoon rush periods and that’s not going to change any time soon, but with more and more people working flexible schedules that don’t start and end at regular intervals, how do you draw the line between accounting for that and wasting money?

Another thing to consider is the existence of Uber. Depending on the nature of your trip and the number of people with you, the Wroute model doesn’t always make sense. If you’re always traveling alone it generally does, but things fall apart fairly quickly if not.

Getting from the Fairview Mall area of Kitchener into Guelph or vice versa in an Uber has cost about $45 every time I’ve done it. A Wroute trip of the same distance was $20 per person, unless that changed after Carin and I used it. But using my numbers, the moment your group has more than two people in it you’re financially better off in an Uber, and that’s before we take into account the convenience factor.

An Uber will pick you up where you are and deposit you where you want to be. You don’t have to walk around a city possibly late at night on one end looking for your ride and then be forced to get yourself the rest of the way home even later when the Wroute drops you off at the designated spot. So even when there are only two of you and the cost is essentially a wash, any extra might still be worth eating for the sake of door to door service. I know it was for us. We had a very nice Wroute experience heading to Guelph in the daytime, but when a decent October day became a chilly October night and it was time to head back to Kitchener after hours and hours of fun, wandering through downtown again was just not something we wanted to do. And we didn’t, because we didn’t have to. And it only cost each of us $2.50 more than Wroute would have to go right home.

It’s too bad it didn’t work out and I hope somebody can eventually give it another go, but it’s going to be tough sledding for whomever decides to take it on.

by Steve Wettlaufer -

Guess I Don’t Have To Tell You To Spread ‘Em

Haven’t had a good old fashioned dumb ass public sex story in a while. This’ll work.

Cops say that Gary Hill and Crystal Frances had shared a pint of vodka before they began trysting in public. Cops learned about the coupling around 9 PM from a female passerby who reported that a duo was poised to have sex in front of headquarters.
When a patrolman went outside to investigate, he spotted the 46-year-old Hill with his pants down having sex with Frances (who was not wearing pants or underwear). The couple, lying down on the sidewalk, was “actively engaging in sexual intercourse,” police charge.

Yes, headquarters is indeed a reference to a headquarters of the police variety. Why wouldn’t it be?

When police questioned him, Hill offered an entirely logical explanation for what happened.

“I’m horny. She was giving it up to me right then and there.”

Unfortunately for hill, the police weren’t having any of his strike while the iron is hot defense and decided to charge him with indecent exposure and jail him on $7500 bond instead of letting him finish. They were also seemingly uninterested in his statement that this is “a Key West moment,” although I’m sure the tourism department is suddenly in a rush to do up some new license plates.

Frances hadn’t been arrested at the time of this report. She was deemed too intoxicated for that at the scene and taken to a hospital to dry out instead.

by Steve Wettlaufer -

What’s The Matter? I Thought You Guys Loved Cuts

‘It goes way overboard’: Ford calls OPP on protesters who brought guillotine to Queen’s Park

I had to say the obvious thing in the title, but now I need to have a word with whomever did this and anyone who thinks it might be a good idea to do some similar thing in the future.

Please don’t.

Protesting is good. I’m glad so many folks are out there giving a voice and a face to the many genuine concerns we all have about the things this government is doing. We need that. Please keep it up. Bring signs, bring friends, but for the love of god, please don’t bring the local theatre’s prop closet. Stunts like this aren’t doing our side any good. In fact, you’re helping Ford more than anything else. If him and his people point to you and your baby’s first executioner set and say ” there’s no reasoning with this band of lunatics and clowns, just ignore them,” there’s no way to argue he’s wrong. It’s ammunition for their side, not support for ours. We’re supposed to be the reasonable ones. The smart ones. The right ones. the ones that can claim the moral high ground because we actually care about people’s quality of life. We can do so much better than this.

The OPP has been informed about a group of protesters who brought a fake guillotine to Queen’s Park on Wednesday, the premier’s office has announced.

A few hundred people showed up to the protest outside Queen’s Park in what was called a “General Strike Against Doug Ford” on a Facebook event page.
Several masked attendees carried the wooden guillotine dotted with red paint onto the lawn and held signs that said “No cuts but this cut,” and “May history repeat itself, Chop, Chop!”

Lisa MacLeod, the province’s minister of children, community and social services, called the guillotine a “credible threat” and told reporters the party has referred the incident to the provincial police.  
“Masked protesters brought a bloodied guillotine to the grounds of Queen’s Park and you know what they did? They beheaded an effigy of the premier. This is disgusting,” MacLeod said.
CBC Toronto could not confirm if the group did, in fact, behead an effigy of Ford.