I Have To Take Bell’s Side On Something And I Hate It

A Netflix deal for Warner means curtains for Crave unless Canadian regulators step in
For the good of the industry there’s no way that mergers like these should almost ever be approved, but let’s not waste one single second pretending that it wouldn’t be just a little bit fucking hilarious if Bell was undone by the very same monopolistic tendencies and spineless regulatory bodies that it’s been using to its advantage to ruin media and telecom in this country for decades.

Today, Netflix is the most subscribed streaming service in Canada, with about nine million subscribers. Crave, on the other hand, has 4.3 million subscribers. While it’s unknown how many customers subscribe to both services, many Canadians use Crave specifically to access HBO’s catalogue.
Should the DOJ review and approve the deal, the Competition Bureau must require Netflix to sell HBO assets to a Canadian buyer to preserve competition in the Canadian market. I say this because for Netflix to optimize the acquired content’s value, their best move is to offer it on their own platform. Subsequently, it’s likely that Netflix will either pay to void their contract with Bell Media or allow it to expire.
The impact on Crave will be mass migration to Netflix as content becomes consolidated and subscribers seek out cost savings. The scale of this exodus could be in the hundreds of thousands, putting Crave in a compromising position and jeopardizing its survival. This is particularly concerning because Bell Media expanded its long-term partnership agreement with WBD in 2024.
The deal would then leave Crave with a content gap that can’t meaningfully be filled through other partnerships or even Canadian television shows. This might sound dismissive of Canadian content, but what gives Crave its value proposition and market edge is HBO Max’s content. That content provides the company with direct access to the Canadian market without WBD having to build its own infrastructure and navigate government regulations. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship with Crave arguably gaining the most.

Christmas Is Right Around the Corner! Roar!

I know. I stole the title from something that was said at an Arrogant Worms concert, but I’ve thought it ever since.

If you’re sick of the usual Christmas songs, here’s one for you. It’s been stuck in my head since I heard it.

When I heard this one for the first time, I couldn’t stop laughing, while the other half of my mind was saying “This isn’t funny, so why are you laughing?” I think there was always a small part of me that wondered what was up with Santa’s happy elves. It’s kind of like the physics of Santa Claus.

I thought this would be another opportunity to tease my mom a little bit. There’s a line in here about being waterboarded with hot cocoa. This made me think of a conversation we had…that sounds terrible, but bear with me…where mom totally used the wrong word. We were out for dinner, and she was talking about how some friends’ kids were out on the lake and they went “waterboarding”. At this point, all the colour drained from my face…at least I’m pretty sure it did. I managed to ask her what they did again and we figured out it was wakeboarding. Oh! That’s a totally different thing! And the colour returned. Poor Mom. She must have wondered why I looked like I’d seen a ghost.

I know that every year, when talking about my Christmas shopping, I say that I was running behind, or a little late. But this year, I skidded into the finish line, and not a moment too soon! Seriously! I bought my last gift on December 23. That is not my style.

Some of that was because I didn’t get ideas until way later, but some of it is because of the clustershmoz that is shipping things between Canada and the U.S. now. And the simple solution would be to just get people Amazon gift cards, but in some cases, I just got them one of those! I like coming up with fun things to get them. I was lucky that one friend took me to a spa when I went to see her, and the name of the spa was in my email. Sometimes it pays to be an email hoarder. So I called the spa and they helped me buy and mail a gift card.

But the other friend was a whole other adventure. I ended up getting on Google Maps and finding some places near them that looked neat and tried to buy gift cards to them. I chose a breakfast place, a dinner place and an ice cream place because I’m silly. But I got this inspiration on Sunday, and one of my chosen places was only open Tuesday to Saturday! So after several snafus, I managed to get gift cards to two of the places. But the ice cream place let me down. The person on the phone claimed that the only way to buy a gift card was to come in the store and buy it. Gees! How oldschool!

But it’s not always a guarantee that you can buy gift cards to American restaurants if you live in Canada. Some of their payment systems only take zip codes. Dude! It’s the worldwide web. Not all my friends are local. How dumb is it to pretend the whole world is the U.S.?

And don’t even get me started on Apple. I was in a secret Santa exchange a couple of years ago, and the person I got was from the states and said she liked iTunes gift cards. So I thought “This will be simple!” After searching help files and getting stuck on hold with Apple Support, I found out that no, you can only buy iTunes cards in your own currency. Duuuuuumb! I mean, if Apple Pay can’t handle it, credit cards have figured out currency conversion for years. It’s not that hard. So yeah…Christmas shopping was a bit of a scramble, but it’s done. Now I get to find out how I did.

And now it’s time to do the quadruple-decker Christmas festivities. I’m sure they will be a mix of happy, funny, and a little sad since this is the first Christmas without Steve’s grandpa. He was always such a big part of Christmas. But I guess we’ll make new memories.

Hopefully, after we survive the holidays, I’ll be able to write more things. I am full of ideas. I just can’t seem to find the time or the mental focus to pull it off. I can only hope I’ll do better next year.

I hope everyone is having a good holiday, whatever you celebrate. Oooo! Here’s another song that should be much happier than the other one.

Have a good one. Try to stay sane.

Oh, So You Like Soccer, Do You? Well Then How’s About You Show Me Your Balls!

I’m sure the Elon Musk factor explains a lot of this (his AI does think it’s Hitler and that that’s a positive, after all), but it’s hard to imagine how we got from where we started to where we finished here.

A Toronto mom says things took an unpredictable turn when her 12-year-old son asked Tesla’s AI chatbot Grok which professional soccer player it prefers: Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi.
“My son was very excited to hear that the chatbot thought Ronaldo was the better soccer player,” said Farah Nasser, a former journalist and broadcaster. 
Nasser was driving her son and 10-year-old daughter, along with her friend, home from school on Oct. 17 when the interaction took place.

She said there was some Messi trash talking by the chatbot and when her son joked that Ronaldo had scored, the conversation went to an unexpected place.
“The chatbot said to my son, ‘Why don’t you send me some nudes?'” said Nasser.
“I was at a loss for words. Why is a chatbot asking my children to send naked pictures in our family car? It just didn’t make sense.”

Maybe it wanted to score too?

She says that the NSFW mode was off, but that she hadn’t taken the extra step of activating the for kids setting. She figured that the default personalities would be fine, which, well, yeah. I think any reasonable person would think that.

The problem is that very little about AI in general is reasonable, and that isn’t just an Elon issue. It’s an everyone issue. The people in charge of nearly every damn aspect of life have decided that if you’re not embracing AI that you’re being left behind, and as usual when they think there are a few bucks to be made or a few corners that can be cut, have conveniently forgotten one of the most important lessons that we all are supposed to have learned as children. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. I’m not saying that there isn’t anyone out there carefully considering the implications of all this technology, but it’s pretty evident at this point that none of those people are the ones calling the shots.

And now, back to Elon and his apparently pedophile AI.

Tesla did not respond to CBC’s questions about Nasser’s experience. However, xAI provided what appeared to be an automated reply, stating, “Legacy media lies.”

Our future is in good hands.

You Ruined Everything! BOOOOOOOOO!

I enjoyed this. Enjoyed it a lot more than I enjoyed how the damn World Series turned out, that’s for sure. Thanks a lot, Freeman. Such a clown.

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.