Of all the sites on the internet, this is one.
I’m not going to pretend I know anything about Matt Corby beyond whatever’s on his website, but I most definitely enjoyed his cover of TLC’s “No Scrubs”, because as we should all know by now, I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.
This was done for a segment on Australian radio station Triple J called “Like A Version”, a name I can also appreciate.
There’s no doubt that Saturday Night Live is one of the greatest, most important comedy shows of all time, even if sometimes it leaves me sitting in front of the TV completely confused or muttering to myself about how something or other is the worst shit I’ve ever seen. But I suppose that’s one of the reasons it’s stuck around for so long. Humour is subjective, and SNL, most of the time, manages to have a little something for everyone. If I’m bored to tears one minute, the next I might see something that will have me talking about vans down by the river for the rest of my damn life.
That hardly makes me unique. I’m Pretty sure everyone I know has a similar relationship with the show. They have their favourite eras and everything else sucks ass. It’s been that way for 50 years, and I hope it never changes even though television as we know it is eventually going to die.
There are two aspects of SNL that I’ve always enjoyed no matter which decade I’m watching. Weekend Update and the fake commercials. So I’ve been having a good time with this Rolling Stone list of their 50 favourite parody ads. A lot of the classics are here. Bass-o-matic, Swill, Happy Fun Ball, Shimmer Floor Wax, and there are also some I’ve never seen, like this one for Almost Pizza.
Or Wade Blasingame, dog suing attorney.
And Chickham Apple Farm, which even features someone briefly breaking character.
While we’re at it, they also did a list of the 50 best characters. It’s pretty fun too. What was that about a van down by the river?
By the way, if you’re using a screen reader, press enter on the photos at the start of each item in the commercials list if you want to watch the video. It’ll turn it into a YouTube player that will start automatically. Only downside is you’ll have to skip an ad or two each time, which sucks if you’re like me and pay for YouTube without the ads.
They say that the best jokes often start out with a grain of truth. If that’s true, then this one makes me feel like I’ve just been run over by a truck full of them.
Speaking of which, if I get asked to sign into a random website with my Google account one more time…
Oh, and now also feels like a good time to revisit this, which I’m sad to say has not gotten any better in spite of my considerable influence. Hey, don’t laugh. It took a while, but Patreon did eventually listen to me.
My brain has been through a lot these last couple weeks (more on that sometime down the road I’m sure), but I still have no idea why this particular scam worked. Maybe you can pull it once because there’s someone out there that’ll fall for anything, but multiple times? Nothing about it makes any sense.
According to investigators, between October 2024 and August 2025, a man posing as a babysitter named “Ashley Turnbull” was hired for a number of babysitting jobs. They did not disclose how many jobs he was hired for.
Police allege the man would send cheques to the victims and ask them to deposit the funds into their accounts. He would then request that they transfer the money from the cheque back to the accused, so the funds could be used for supplies and material needed to babysit.“When the cheques were deposited into the victims’ accounts and transferred, often days later, they learned the cheques were fraudulent,” police said in a news release issued Wednesday.
The money was never recovered, police said.
Forget babysitting, which I’ve done without requiring such a convoluted process or even much of a process at all, but this just is not how literally anything ever works. The tiniest bit of thought and the whole thing falls apart.
If supplies are needed, you buy them and then figure it into what you charge the customer when the job is done, or the customer provides them and you do the job. Those are your choices. No matter which one you choose, if everyone is on the level, then someone is using his own money from one of his own accounts to accomplish the goal. This would, assuming that common sense is our guide, mean that if you have cheques to deposit, you would go ahead and deposit those on your own. You would definitely not go to the trouble of writing a cheque to your customer, because that makes no sense. You have the money, go buy the stuff. No need for the weird extra steps that do nothing but inconvenience everyone involved. And if you did for some reason want to write a cheque to your customer, then why in the world would your customer ever agree to cash it and send the money back to you unless your customer is a dunderhead, because that’s sketchy as all hell if you bother to use five seconds of thinking power. You can’t even blame desperation on the client side here, because if you have time to wait for a cheque to come to your door, you have time to find a babysitter that isn’t a straight up crook.
I do hope that this Kim Manget fellow does some time and is forced to make restitution to the people he defrauded assuming he’s guilty, but I won’t lie. I don’t think it would hurt my feelings much if none of those people ever saw a dime. I know we aren’t supposed to blame victims, but now and then there are people who need a good victimizing so that they can perhaps make up for the practical critical thinking skills they clearly missed out on as children when the rest of us learned them.
User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died
This reminds me of a good friend of ours. He loves the idea of new technology, but he has no idea how to use any of it, god bless him.
Years ago, when Aftershokz came out with wireless headphones, he excitedly bought a pair. He was so happy! … For a day or two.
But then, as tends to happen when he buys something new, we got a phone call.
“My headset stopped working. I don’t know why.”
Carin, realizing she should probably start with the simplest possible explanation, asked the simplest possible question.
“How long has it been since you charged it?”
“CHARGE IT! CHARGE IT!!!!! I have to charge it?”
“Yes,” she explained, fighting some pretty intense laughter.”
“But it’s supposed to be wireless!”
She then went on to give the speech about how wireless means no wires between the headphones and whatever you’re plugging them into, but that the headphones still have a battery in them that’s going to need to be charged, which is what the cord in the box is for.
He was so disappointed.
“I thought that was a microphone or something that I could plug into the computer if I wanted to,” he lamented. “I can’t believe I have to charge these. They were supposed to be convenient!”
I don’t know if he still uses them, but at least we’ve gotten his money’s worth out of that story.
“THIS ****ING LAPTOP DOESN’T WORK! YOU GAVE ME A PIECE OF ****!”
Cathy politely asked for an explanation of the problem.
“I WAS WORKING AND IT JUST ****ING SHUT OFF” came the shouted reply.
Cathy went into troubleshooting mode, and ran down a list of questions that started with a request to recount any error messages the machine had displayed and ended with a query about whether the user had seated the power cord snugly in its socket.
“WHAT POWER CORD?” came the bellicose reply.
Cathy explained that she’d tucked the laptop’s power supply into the nice bag.
She then heard the unmistakable sounds of Velcro, unfurling cables, and a plug meeting a socket.
“It’s back,” the user said.
Cathy realized what had happened and tried to be polite about it by suggesting the user had perhaps struggled to find the battery life indicator on her new machine.
“YOU SAID THIS ****ING THING WAS WIRELESS!” came the obtuse reply.
“Yes,” Cathy replied drily. “It has wireless networking. Did you think it had a nuclear battery or something? It needs to be recharged just like your last laptop.”
After a brief pause, the user thanked Cathy and hung up.
Make speed camera signs bigger, brighter, and bolder, driver says after $88 ticket
I’ve got a better idea. What if, instead of more signage, there were less signage and you all just, like, drove properly?
In a perfect world, there would be no signs announcing speed cameras at all. The one announcing the speed limit is all you really need. The speed limit, in case you’ve forgotten, isn’t a suggestion. It’s a regulation. One which you flout at not just your own risk, but also mine. Just like any other gamble, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And if you have to lose, a ticket is a much better way of doing so than killing a bunch of people because you’re too important to slow the fuck down.
Can those cameras be a cash grab? Yes. Is that a problem? No. Not when those from whom the cash is being grabbed could have so easily prevented its grabbing. If they can’t even bother to do that, then grab away, cameras. Grab away. Grab enough and maybe we can even use all that money to pay for things like municipal snow removal so that those like me who will never have the privilege of driving our own guided missiles can at least safely navigate the sidewalks.
Dull signage is among several beefs Wang has with speed cameras in school zones.
He doesn’t like that they operate around the clock when schools are closed. He thinks tickets are too costly, and he’s frustrated by a misunderstanding about the appeal process that derailed his ticket challenge.
He’s not buying the government’s argument that cameras in school zones are about making roads safer for schoolchildren.
“I personally don’t feel like I have done anything wrong, given the circumstances,” he said.
Christ, what a whiny little bitch. But he’s a whiny little bitch who does have a bit of a gripe under our current system, assuming he’s telling the truth.
Wang is upset about his $88 ticket for driving 53 km/h past Laurentian Public School, where regional council has dropped the limit to 40 km/h from 50 as a safety measure.
A sign on Westmount Road East announces the camera. Wang says his view of it was obscured by a road construction sign that was directly in his eye line when he turned onto Westmount from a plaza.“I never saw it,” he said.
The Kitchener man, who owns a language school, was ticketed for an infraction in May. Last week there was still road construction near the school and camera sign.
But again, I remind you all that this whole thing could have likely been avoided if our man here had simply obeyed the sign he could see, that being the one with the speed limit on it. And honestly, even he should be on my side here, because if there were no camera sign for him to not have seen, he’d have been nabbed fair and square and have had nothing to complain about since he admits he was speeding.
I don’t know how often they do these on the show, but I’ve only seen a couple of them. I posted one, but I’m pretty sure there’s at least one more that I didn’t put up for some reason. Maybe I’ll try to find it. But until then, enjoy Seth Meyers talking to Karoline Leavitt. It’s as real as anything else she says.
Well, darn it all. I just got the news that Tom Lehrer passed away. He was 97, so he had a pretty long life, but it’s still sad.
That’s probably the song that everyone knows him the most for, but the first one that I knew to be his was called “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”
When I found out his name, I decided to see if I could find more of his stuff…and merrily down the Tom Lehrer rabbit hole I went.
At which point, I landed on a song that I had heard Dad sing a few lines of from time to time. I just thought Dad was being weird, but I finally knew it was a real song. That was a revelation.
It took a while, but I think I found almost all of his stuff, and what a collection of stuff! There were songs about war, songs about nuclear bombs, freedom of the press…kind of, pollution, Harvard,, you name it, he probably wrote a song about it. And he wrote a bunch of them in the 50’s and 60’s and they’re still funny today.
And then he went and wrote kids’ songs! I had no idea he was in The Electric Company!
But I feel like a jerk mentioning all his music because in his later years, I heard that he really didn’t want to talk about that anymore. I don’t know if he was just sick of everybody talking about it, or if he wanted to be more known for his work in math, but that guy made a lot of good music. Lots of it was dark, but all of it was brilliant! But what else can you expect from a guy who got a math degree at 18? He says we can’t get away from mathematics, and he couldn’t get away from his music.
We’ve lost a genius today. But his music will stay with us for a long long time.
Someone at Heathrow Airport has spent a little too much time at Heathrow Airport. They have stopped noticing the ambient noise that is caused by people doing what you do at an airport. You know, hearing announcements, picking up your luggage, going through security, walking from A to B. So they thought “You know what would Spruce up this place? If it had a soundtrack of baggage carousels, planes taking off, announcements, people walking around, beeps and boops from security and other airport noises, all set to music! Brilliant!” and it was done!
Does anyone else see the problem with this? Those real sounds are already in the airport. We don’t need a second layer of them. That just causes chaos to anyone who might be relying on those sounds for clues about where they are or what’s going on. I don’t want to have to think “There’s a gate announcement. Is that a real gate announcement or one of those fake ones?”
This happens to me on a smaller scale whenever I enter a store with self-checkouts. When I was younger, I could walk into a store and listen for the sound of cash registers. Cash registers were manned by humans, so I could walk towards that beeping, find a human, and ask for assistance around the store. But self-checkouts make beeps and boops just like the old registers, so I can’t target the beeping things and get help. It sucks! Now amplify that by a whole pile at the airport.
I know that usually I’m getting help around the airport, but there are some crazy good frequent flying blind folks that walk through airports independently. And even if I’m getting help, I’d like to be able to trust my ears to give me clues about what’s happening. If my gate changes, for example, I might hear that announcement before my assistant notices the change on the board. Now, I’ll have to wonder if the announcement I’ve heard is a real one or a fake one.
I know the soundtrack of airport noise is set to music, so maybe that will be no big deal if real announcements stop the music when they talk, but what if they don’t?
Airports are noisy enough as it is. We don’t need double noise. I don’t think the effect will be exciting for travellers, even the ones that can see. Some people are sensitive to sound and don’t need more of it. I think what they will have done is make the experience unnecessarily overwhelming.
Back a very very long time ago, I learned that if you ever have to do CPR and need a way to keep the compressions well-timed, you can use certain songs. At the time, the only one I had heard about was ‘stayin alive’.
Now, I have found a whole medley of good CPR songs.
I do have to giggle that “Another One Bites the Dust” is in here. I found another medley that contained “Highway to Hell” and “Baby Shark” But I think you get the idea with this one. I guess the key is that it needs to be 100-120 beats per minute, which matches the number of compressions.
Somebody created a Spotify playlist of good CPR songs, and it’s 9 hours long! Duuuude! I hope nobody ever needs that much CPR music. Hopefully they can find a LUCAS or something!