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.

What An Idiot It Is

Normally I don’t have a lot of time for people who complain that true but unflattering things about them can be easily Googled (we don’t edit Hitler out of the war footage because it makes his family feel bad), but the key word there is true. Because while it’s one thing to have to wear something bad or stupid that you actually did, it’s quite another to have Google itself straight up inventing awful things about you and presenting them as authoritative facts.

Ashley MacIsaac has been a popular Maritime musician for 30 years.
The renowned fiddler was set to perform a concert in Shubenacadie, N.S., this Friday night, but was forced to cancel.
“The chief messaged back and said, ‘We can’t have you in our community due to your past criminal convictions,’’’ and I thought, ‘What are they talking about? I got arrested once for smoking marijuana,’” says MacIsaac.

The offences they were referring to included internet luring and sexual assault.
An apparent Google search using AI, which has now been corrected, recently described the popular fiddler as a criminal sex offender.
But the sex offender was another man with the last name MacIsaac.

Cyber experts say incidents like these are known as “AI confabulations”
“Anybody that shares a name with anyone could be a victim of this kind of AI confabulation, where it takes information and combines it together. And this is a great example of how dumb AI actually is,” says David Shipley, CEO of Beauceron Security.
“All it is, is a parrot. It just repeats information it encounters. It has no sense for what the truth is or what reality is, and it is causing massive harm. Google, OpenAI, Meta and others that have rolled out this technology in an incredibly irresponsible way, are directly responsible for this mess today, and Mr. MacIsaac’s case is not in isolation.”

I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to hear someone say that last bit out loud in a mainstream news setting, because it’s something people need to hear. AI, for all the good it can do and in spite of all the flashy crap it does to impress people, is both incredibly dangerous and incredibly dumb, and has been deployed in a stunningly reckless manner. The people doing that deploying don’t even fully understand how it works. That’s bad, and it’s only going to get worse.

Giving In The Name

One thing I’ve never been able to get my head around is why on earth anyone would donate to a charity in someone elses’ name as a Christmas present. It’s a terrible gift. Not because you don’t wind up getting any stuff, although I will admit to having that thought as a child. the problem is simply that gift giving can be hard and a lot of people really aren’t good at it.

Think back to some of the gifts you’ve gotten in your life. Maybe even this year. how many times have you opened something and thought to yourself, do you even know me? Yes, I have hands and I could use some gloves, but what about me would honestly make you think that I would need Andre the Giant sized hot pink ones?

Charitable giving is like that, but with higher stakes. The cause has to be the right fit, because you’re out there publicly putting my name on it. And I mean no offence when I say this, but there’s no one in my life aside from maybe Carin that I would trust to get it right. Not even my mom, and she’s an excellent gift giver.

In the best case, the person might almost get there.

Steve’s blind. He’d love to help out a blindness organization, I’ll bet.

Sure, but probably not any of the ones you’ve got in mind. Some of those people are straight up nuts and don’t need encouragement. Some of them have opinions or attitudes I don’t agree with. And others have strayed so far from what they were when I was growing up that they’re hard to recognize as the same folks who helped me. but now I’m endorsing their methods whether I like it or not.

But even worse, there’s a chance I’d end up giving to something that I want absolutely no part of because people have a tendency to think that what they like or believe in is what everyone else likes too. No, just because most of the family votes Conservative doesn’t mean that a few of us haven’t wised up. Yes, I know we’re a lot alike in a lot of ways, but the difference is that when I make the racist joke, I’m joking.

Hopefully, if you’re the kind of person who does this sort of thing, I’ve made you think twice about it. But if not, allow me to suggest another way for you to accomplish the same goal.

Take whatever money you were planning to donate *for* me and give it *to* me. Make it clear in a note that this money is for charity, and that if I don’t give to something, you’re going to want it back. And yes, you’ll be needing to see the receipt.

Maybe not as elegant as saying “hey, I donated to MAGA for you, enjoy the hat,” but I guarantee you it’ll cost you an awful lot less in the way of bad feelings.

This Is Definitely The Eighth Day. Maybe


This is 100% me right now. The only difference is that I haven’t known what day it is since December 20th when my birthday ended. It was easier to sort it out then than it’s been since we left for family Christmas on the 24th, though. Jesus.

Every day away felt like it should be a Sunday, because my family almost always gets together to celebrate things on Sundays. But none of those days were Sundays. What they were was a bunch of Christmases because each one had a party in it, which made them all into Thursdays until you forgot that Christmas was Thursday and moved it back to Sunday again. And then there was the night we watched Jeopardy and made everything into Friday for a while. Can’t forget that.

We’ve been back home since what I’m pretty sure was last Saturday the 27th and I still don’t know which way is up.

The night we got in, I decided to sit down and watch the late news because I was feeling a bit out of the loop. There was no news on Kitchener CTV because of a football game, but that was fine. I’d try London. It’s close enough to where my family is and we’d just come from there. But wait. Oh, my god! What in the actual fuck is this random episode of Corner Gas doing on where the news should go, you cheap ass motherfuckers!? This isn’t a holiday! It’s a random Wednesday, you pri…oh. Right. This is Saturday. Fuck me. My point about Bell being cheap ass motherfuckers stands because they don’t have weekend news at all now, but you can see where I’m at.

And to top it all off, when I went to bed around midnight on that Saturday or Wednesday or whatever, my phone said it had just become Sunday! I knew I’d be right sooner or later! At least until I woke up a few hours later convinced it was Monday.

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.