Yeah, Ya Did

I hadn’t thought about it until I came across this story just now, but how can it possibly be that more things don’t get set on fire while “We Didn’t Start the Fire” blasts away nearby? Or at the very least, how come I don’t hear about them if in fact there are more? My first instinct is that it doesn’t happen because while those people may be arsonists, liars they are not. But then I remember that most of the world has danced to “Every Breath You Take” as if it’s a love song, so there’s almost no chance that logic has any part to play here. It certainly didn’t this time, at least.

As detailed in a probable cause statement, Duluth Police Department officers were dispatched to the duplex around 4 AM following a 911 call. When first responders arrived, “they saw the upstairs apartment in flames with ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ blaring from the upstairs apartment.”
Carlson, who purchased the building in 2005, lives upstairs and rents out the downstairs space in the property, which was built in 1901.
The downstairs tenant told cops that he was awoken by the sounds of Carlson “smashing glass and breaking things” inside the upstairs unit. A neighbor reported seeing Carlson “wearing a helmet and smashing his own windows” around 3:30 AM. The witness added that he saw Carlson “under his truck with gas cans, going in and out of the house” before seeing “a flash like a fireball come from the upstairs apartment.”
Arson investigators discovered “a drilled hole in the gas tank of the Defendant’s truck” and “lids to gas cans laying on the ground by the truck.” Additionally, a drill was found nearby.
The downstairs tenant told cops that after Carlson laid ruin to his own apartment for 20 minutes, he knocked on the tenant’s door to announce, “The house is on fire.”

If anyone knows why this happened, they don’t seem to be talking. Not that we’d understand much of it if they did, but you know.

All I can tell you at the moment is that Travis Carlson, who could have been spending the better part of the next 20 years in prison if sentenced to the maximum on his first degree arson charge, instead received three years probation.

Jimmy Kimmel Is Back On TV. Maybe Miracles Are Real

I think I said everything I had to say about this last week, so I’ll try to keep things short so you can just go ahead and watch the 28 minute video.

I’m genuinely surprised that Kimmel got his show back. Given the current refusal of any corporate giant to do the bare ass minimum to stand up for anything even remotely resembling what’s right, I figured he would quietly fade away while we all got distracted by the next stupid Trump thing. Just watch this senile orange dipshit try to pronounce Acetaminophen.

Anyway, I’m glad that for the moment, good sense and free speech won out. But it’s only a battle you’ve won, America. the war isn’t over. Don’t forget that.

As for the monologue, I don’t think it could have been handled much better. He hit every serious point he needed to hit, gave credit where it was due to right wingers who spoke out against what the government was trying to do to him which is how things mostly used to work, and even found time to be funny (the new FCC chairman is a particular highlight).

Just Call It The CFNFL And Get It Over With

The CFL announced a bunch of rule changes yesterday that will be phased in over the next few years and I’ve gotta tell ya, I don’t think I like ’em much.

Ok, so maybe that’s not totally fair. I’m sure some of it will be fine, and perhaps even good. If the play clock can get things moving along a little faster like the pitch clock has in baseball, for instance, it’s hard to see how that can be anything but a positive.

But this shortening the field business? You can pack that shit up and get it the fuck right out of here.

First of all, the whole premise it’s supposedly built on feels to me like a faulty one. Admittedly I don’t watch every game, but I’ve seen my share. And whenever I do watch, I never come away thinking that this right here is a league with a scoring problem. There’s an expression you often hear when people talk about Canadian football. “No lead is safe”. You hear it a lot because it tends to be true. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stepped away from a game to deal with something or other only to come back to a score that’s completely flipped. that doesn’t happen because no one can find a frigging end zone. Is every game a barnburner? Of course not. But that would be the case regardless of what rules you change. But for me as a fan, the three downs as opposed to four and the longer field is exactly what makes even the less entertaining ones more exciting than they would be otherwise.

And that leads me to my biggest issue. I don’t watch the NFL, and I don’t want to. I watch the CFL because I think it’s better football. I understand that adapting is sometimes necessary, but setting us on a path toward complete NFLification isn’t adapting, it’s chasing an impossible dream. The CFL will never be the NFL, no matter how much some folks would like it to be (How ya doin’, MLSE?). People who prefer the NFL have plenty of options to get their fix from the actual NFL. I can’t imagine most of them having much need for a low budget, sad sack clone of it. Meanwhile, those of us who would like to support a CFL are eventually going to be left with nothing.

Yes, it would be nice to see the league grow and become more financially stable, especially in cities where losing money is a problem. But there have got to be better ways of accomplishing that than hollowing out and selling out the Canadian game until it’s no longer recognizable as the Canadian game.

Why Does Larry Mellott Sound So Young Now?

For a lot of reasons, I’ve been way more behind on even more things than usual for quite a while now. One of those things, I have just come to discover, is that Larry Mellott retired from calling Guelph Storm games at the end of last season.

Congrats on a great run, Larry! It won’t be the same without you, but you’ve certainly earned it.

He says that one of the main reasons he’s decided to hang it up is the health of some family members. We can certainly relate to that, especially these last few years. Here’s hoping for the best for everyone.

So what happens now? Who gets the task of trying to replace a local legend?

That would be Dylan Baker, who at just 19 years old already has a fair bit of experience.

Baker has been the voice of the Greater Ontario Junior Hockey League’s Komoka Kings since the fall of 2019. That is where, at 13, he got the broadcast bug.
“I think I decided (this was for me) pretty quickly, once I got going, because I just loved it so much,” he said.
It’s the same year he got his start with the Intercounty Baseball League’s London Majors, and has been calling baseball games every summer since.
Last year, he joined 519 Sports Online and began travelling around to GOJHL rinks to call games. 
Baker is also bilingual, and has utilized that skill as the French public address voice at the last two Memorial Cups. He also provided the French play-by-play at the U SPORTS women’s national hockey championship last spring.
“I’ve had my fair share of great hockey moments over the years, and I’ve been very lucky,” he said.
Baker is calling games both at home and on the road, and said he will likely miss one or two games because of exams.
He is in the third year of a four-year sport media program at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“It’s definitely going to be busy to balance it all, but when an opportunity like this presents itself, you can’t pass it up,” he said. “You have to jump all over it.”

I’ve seen some of his 519 Sports work and found it to be pretty solid. For a while it’ll be really friggin weird hearing someone who isn’t Larry when I tune in, but I think he’ll do just fine.

Go Storm!

Trump Gets Another Wish As Jimmy Kimmel Is Pulled Off the Air For no Good Reason. Enjoy Your Dictatorship, America

ABC Pulls Jimmy Kimmel Live! Over Kirk Killer Remarks
If anything I’m about to say sounds dramatic to you, too bad. Because moments like these are how democracies die.

When the powerful chill speech, people stop speaking. When no one speaks, no one is holding the powerful accountable. When no one is holding the powerful accountable, the powerful take more and more. It doesn’t happen all at once, but one day, the people wake up in a place they don’t recognize, one that looks an awful lot like Russia or China or North Korea or any of the others that Trump has praised. Places where there is no speech unless it’s government approved. Where there are no elections unless it’s already clear who’s going to win with a resounding 112% of the vote.

This is a pattern, one that’s been years in the making. Trump has spent a decade attacking and threatening the media and his critics at every opportunity. He does it in his speeches, in his press conferences, in his interviews, in his writings, in the courts, and with his political appointments. He’s done it so much that a lot of us are numb to it, and that’s the point. If they stop paying attention, the reasoning goes, they won’t notice that they don’t like what we’re doing.

The saddest part is how easy it’s looked, and how willingly anyone with resources has been to bend the knee.

You won’t approve our merger? Yes sir, we’ll get rid of the mean comedian.

You’re going to tie us up in the courts and cost us money we totally can afford over completely fair and reasonable news coverage? Ok sir, here’s an eight figure settlement.

Every one of these capitulations sells out the country a little more, and it’s never going to be enough. there will always be another demand. They’ll take and take and take until there’s nothing worth taking, and then take that too just to make sure you know who’s boss.

And no matter what anyone says, none of this Kimmel business has a damn thing to do with Charlie Kirk, at least not to anyone who counts. He’s just the convenient opening that Trump needed to do something he’s wanted to do for years. When Colbert got axed, he said Kimmel was next. Now that we may never see Kimmel again, he’s already calling for Fallon, Meyers, and even the damn View before the corpse has even had a chance to cool off.

It sure would be nice if someone would stand up and say no more before there’s no more to stand up for.

Kimmel had been the subject of mounting criticism in right-wing media over the last 48 hours. Earlier this afternoon FCC Chair Brendan Carr suggested in an interview that Kimmel could face sanctions from the FCC for his comments.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on Benny Johnson’s Benny Show podcast Wednesday afternoon. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel—or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr, a close ally of President Trump, suggested that Disney, ABC’s parent company, should address Kimmel’s comments before the FCC gets involved, suggesting Kimmel could be suspended. “You could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this,” Carr said.
He went on to urge local network affiliates for ABC and NBC to take action against the networks.
“Frankly I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney, and say, ‘We are going to preempt—we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out,’” Carr said. “It’s time for them to step up and say this garbage—to the extent that that’s what comes down the pipe in the future—isn’t something that serves the needs of our local communities.”

There Is Nothing Freak About This Accident


They’re making a big deal here out of the fact that these two women were deaf and that’s likely why this happened, but personally I feel like the standing on train tracks taking pictures and not paying attention thing might have had more to do with it. Your ears may not work, but as long as your eyes and your brain do, you should know better. If the answer to the one question you must ask yourself at a time like this is no, I am not a train, then you should not be finding yourself on the tracks for a moment longer than necessary.

Members of Montreal’s deaf community are in shock and saddened after two women were struck and killed by a train in Portugal.
Guylaine Boulanger, 62, and Elise Bénard, 66, are hearing impaired and were taking pictures near a river on Saturday near Baqueiros station in Mesao Frio, about 80 kilometres east of Porto.
The Portugal Resident reported that the train conductor blew his horn when he saw the two women on the tracks and applied the brakes, but was unable to stop in time.
The report adds that the two women were with two others, who were not injured, and were taking photos when they were hit.

The Ontario Liberals Have No Idea What They’re Doing, Do They?


I don’t have strong feelings one way or another about Bonnie Crombie, which I suppose may be part of the problem here. But the news that she’s resigning has me surprised and disappointed, because it really doesn’t feel like she was given a fair shot.

She hadn’t even been on the job for a full two years, and the one election campaign she did get to run was one called years earlier than it should have been. that was done, in part, to throw her off balance before she had a chance to get her feet under her. It was also one that, if we’re being honest with ourselves, she had zero chance of winning, because nobody had a reasonable prospect of beating Doug Ford. That the Liberals managed to gain seats was itself a pretty big accomplishment, even if none of those seats went to her. There was at least some upward momentum, which is the best you can hope for when you’re the third party in a majority house.

So with that in mind, I have no idea what the Liberals are hoping to achieve by nudging her toward the exit. They appear to be spinning it as a much needed reset and an opportunity for renewal, but that’s not what it looks like. From where I sit, it looks like desperate flailing, and entirely unnecessary desperate flailing at that. If you want to punch yourself in the dick for no damn reason then have at it, but I’m not sure why you would want to do that. If the goal is to get back on track and eventually topple the Conservatives, instability like this at the top is not going to help. The party would be much better off getting Crombie out in front of people so that everyone outside of Mississauga can get to know who she is. Tour the province. Talk policy whenever you can. Be on people’s radar so that when the next election comes around, those people might think voting Liberal is a worthwhile thing to do.

I mentioned earlier that the Liberals are looking at this as a reset. I think we need to talk more about that.

Noah Parker, an organizer with a group of Liberals who had been urging a leadership race, said while Crombie did a lot of great work for the party, he is looking forward to working on electing a new leader.
“Just look at what happened with our federal Liberals, and the complete excitement and new flurry of fundraising and donors, and of course, the complete 180 of the electoral prospects of that party as a result of a leadership contest,” said Parker, who was also one of several Liberals elected Sunday to the party’s executive council.

Yikes. Talk about a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually happened there.

Yes, a new leader was necessary in that case. Fair or not, the public distaste for Justin Trudeau was such that he was dead on arrival. Had he stayed on, Pierre Poilievre would almost certainly be Prime Minister of Canada right now. But the Liberals fortunes didn’t change just because they were all like “Hey look everyone, we got a new guy!” The only reason, and I do stress the *only* reason that the Liberals are still in power is Donald Trump getting elected again and immediately threatening our economy and sovereignty. To our credit, we the voting public decided at that point that it might be best if we had someone with actual credentials in charge rather than creepy Temu Trump, so that’s what we did. The Liberals just happened to luck into the right person at the right time. Had America voted responsibly last November, there’s a pretty good chance that Mark Carney would have lost, credentials be damned.

What that was was a moment in time. There was a sense of urgency and immediacy that called for a course correction. Unless I’m missing something huge, I have no sense that anything like that exists around Ontario’s Liberals right now.

And so I ask again, why set yourselves adrift when there’s no course to correct?

I’m Gonna Beat You Blind, Brother! Then I’m Gonna Do It To Myself!

I’m still very behind on watching wrestling. I’m not sure I’ll ever catch up, but that’s ok. Pretty much everything I watch these days is good to great, so at least I’m having fun trying.

Anywho, I just got to the point in late May where Fraxiom got their new, main roster entrance music. Like most of the WWE themes now, it’s not really very good. But on the bright side, the words made me pay attention for a minute. At least what I thought were the words, I should say.

Convince me that the man singing these lyrics from a song that sounds like a 90s cartoon and a turn of the century new metal band had a baby isn’t saying “whackin’ off to the maximum”. Go on, try. Because even after reading that the line is supposedly “Rackin’ ’em to the maximum” and then subjecting myself to the entire thing to confirm, I remain unconvinced.

WWE does a lot of things right these days, but music is one area that needs some serious improvement. Every musical change is somehow for the worse, even if where they started was already sort of garbage. Old man yelling at clouds here, but remember when you’d watch a Royal Rumble and whenever the next person’s music hit you would instantly know who it was? Good luck with that now. I like to think I’m pretty good at name that tune, but WWE has pretty well nondescripted me to death.