Municipal Election Vote Compass

If you’re living somewhere that has one, I hope that you’re planning to vote in your upcoming municipal elections. Here in Ontario, they’re on October 26th.

If you want to vote but aren’t sure who to vote for, I don’t blame you. Municipal politics is hard. Provincially and federally it’s generally pretty clear what the main parties are all about, and you only have to pick one person. But locally, things are a lot different. Depending on where you are, you can wind up voting for a lot of stuff. Here in Kitchener, for instance, we have city councillors, regional councillors, a mayor and school board trustees. We would normally also have to pick a regional chair, but Doug Ford has decided that what we really need is an appointed town puppet whose job will be to ask “How high?” whenever he yells “Jump!”, so we no longer vote for that because who needs local democracy or accountability anyway, amiright? And when it comes to all of those positions, there are no official party lines. It’s just a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of opinions, and it can be difficult to sort it all out in a way that makes you feel good about your choices.

That’s where the Vox Pop Labs Vote Compass might be able to help. Tell it where you live by postal code and it will ask you a bunch of questions (I got 30 of them) about where you stand on various issues. It will then give you the names of candidates whose views most align with yours. Sadly it doesn’t help with the school board vote, which is the one I’m having the most trouble with. But it most definitely did give me something to chew on.

My best choices for city and regional council landed about where I expected they would. There were obviously some new faces because the field is different each time, but there were plenty of folks that I’ve either voted for or thought about voting for on my list. But the mayoral race was a different story. My thought was that while I don’t agree with everything he does, that I would likely vote for Berry Vrbanovic again because he’s largely done a good job. But according to the compass, he should be my sixth choice out of the six options it gave me and I really ought to consider Cindy Ward as my front runner.

Alrighty then. Seems I’ve got some more research to do. But that’s not a bad thing whatsoever.

And a note for screen reader users. If you’re not in the mood to futz around with people’s broken accessibility, skip the optional questions at the end. The lists where you can select more than one option work fine, but the radio buttons? Hoooh boy. You can’t read them in or out of forms mode and the only way to tell which one you’re on is to pick one and then tab and shift tab around until it reads it to you. That was my experience with the latest Firefox and NVDA, at least.

American Dictator

This sounds like all kinds of fun and I want to play it.

The London, Ont., teenagers behind “American Dictator,” a board game inspired by Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president, are celebrating a major milestone. The team of 19 neighbourhood kids has sold more than 20,000 copies of their game to buyers in both Canada and the U.S. CBC’s Kendra Seguin speaks with two of the co-creators, Adam and Will Palma, about how they are keeping up with the demand and their latest Trump-inspired “questionable decision” playing cards.

Kids. They’re smarter than you think.

I’m On Bees

For all I know, bee bed therapy could be the greatest thing ever. Maybe it really does do wonders for the body and mind. But personally, I’m skeptical. I can’t recall a single time when the sound of a swarm of insects has calmed me down and bees generally scare the crap out of me to begin with, so I can’t imagine deliberately putting myself that close to them regardless of how unlikely it is that I’ll get stung. I know me. I’d spend the whole time trying to convince myself that I’m not going to get attacked and then leave even more amped up than I was when I got there.

If you’ve done it and it worked for you, that’s honestly great. If you want to go again, you can have my spot.

Inside a small hut on Diana Graham’s 28-hectare Comber-area farm, where she runs Bees and Bloom Wellness, four beehives are underneath each of two wooden beds, with screens separating the insects from clients who lie over them to experience bee bed therapy.
Graham and others who offer the therapy say it can be beneficial in reducing anxiety and stress.
But there’s still a dearth of scientific evidence around it.
Graham said sleeping while surrounded by bees is therapeutic, and her visitors have reported feeling “amazed” and “breathing better” after spending time in the presence of bee pheromones. She said it’s built perfectly safe, so the insects can’t sting her clients.

“The pheromones from the bees help with your immune system, lungs and their buzz, the frequencies, helps with anxiety, depression, PTSD, sleep disorders and overall health,” Graham told CBC News.
“Your anxiety will go down because the hum of these bees is absolutely amazing.”
The air inside the cabin is rich with honey and beeswax scents. Graham said it adds to the wellness.

Putting Some Local Back Into The Local Mall

Clearly I need to spend more time over at the mall. A new, rather fun sounding store opened there over the summer and this is the first I’m hearing of it.

The Local opened on Saturday in Fairview Park Mall, bringing together about 80 Canadian vendors in one space.
Co-owners Lorenz and Rizzy Manaig started the store to help vendors build their businesses at a local scale. 
They say their inspiration for the store drew on personal experience in a “super competitive” online market. 
Rizzy started her own online business in 2018, and found online platforms like Etsy often force vendors to lower their prices, due to the high competition with international sellers. 
“We want to bridge that gap between, How do we help a vendor scale up their products? and also, How do we help them be confident with their pricing?” Lorenz told CBC News.

With tariffs forcing some vendors to close their online businesses, Lorenz says local vendors need another option.

The new spot in Kitchener is their third (they opened stores in London and Port Stanley last year), so I’m guessing things must be going reasonably well.

I’ll be checking it out for sure. I imagine it coming in especially handy come Christmas time, but I love the concept and hope it does great all year long.

Seems Like A Worthy Cause

My sleep is kinda jacked up thanks to Carin’s travel schedule, so I’m pretty sure that’s why this is as funny as it is.
Habitat For Insanity Invests 35 Million Seashells Into Building Affordable Teeth

LOONSVILLE, MI—Calling the initiative an urgently needed infusion of resources into the organization’s core mission, the nonprofit Habitat for Insanity announced Friday its intention to invest 35 million seashells into building affordable teeth. “At Habitat for Insanity, we’ve long been devoted to helping the downtrodden penguins, the worn-down boots, the gnomes, and the small intestines in our neighborhoods, and these 35 million seashells will do exactly that,” said Habitat for Insanity CEO Merlin T. Quack, who spoke in front of a large pile of teeth, copper wire, lint, and hundreds of small, apparently homemade clay figurines, and concluded the press conference by stripping naked and pouring several gallons of milk over his head.

It goes on, but not long enough for us to figure out what Barbara’s been saying.

Happy Birthday To Me. Yup, That’s Definitely Me

The thing I’m most curious about here probably isn’t what most of you would consider the obvious one. We’ll get to that. But what I really want to know is why buddy here needed three birthday cakes. Were they all for him? How big was that party? Or does he just happen to have a couple of friends with the same birthday? And why didn’t the other cakes have faces on them? Wouldn’t you want your face on all of them if you’re supposed to be the man of the hour? And if they’re not all for the same party, what makes him so special?

Actually, scratch that last one, because he is most definitely special. So special, in fact, that he didn’t have the good sense not to shoplift the cake with his face on it from the people who would absolutely have a picture of him.

Police say Jackson entered the store and picked up three cakes he had ordered at the bakery counter. He then went through the store, selected four canned goods, two candles, a small cupcake and a box of chips.
Once at self-checkout, Jackson paid $12.99 for some of the items he purchased, but left the store without paying for the remaining items, including the cakes. The total loss to the store was $90.40, police claim.
Witnesses told police that the person who ordered the cakes was the same person pictured in a photo printed on one of them. Police used that photo along with surveillance footage of the alleged incident to identify Jackson as the suspect.

I was going to point out that he didn’t grab enough candles for all that cake, but then I discovered that one of his prior retail theft convictions came as a result of stealing scented candles, so chances are he had enough lying around the house.

It Was Perhaps My Destiny To Be In Bees

This poor woman didn’t wind up getting stung nearly as many times as most of the folks who find themselves in this section, but when you get stung by a bunch of bees and your name is Honeycombe, things like quantity and severity matter a lot less than they normally would.

Caroline Honeycombe, her sister Jo Dawson and Jo’s eight-year-old daughter were attacked while walking their horses on a hilltop in St Ouen, Jersey.
She was stung more than 60 times and needed to be put on a drip after going to A&E, with her niece also requiring treatment for multiple stings around her head.
The other horses bolted in a panic, but Mrs Honeycombe’s pony, Blue, was stung around 80 times and also needed emergency treatment from a vet.
The attack happened when a beekeeper was opening hives – thought to contain around a million bees – nearby to check on the honey in the combs.

Everyone is expected to be just fine. And the beekeeper in question, Nick Faulkner, later brought the Honeycombe family a few jars of honey as an apology and also offered to cover their expenses, so it appears that things ended up about as well as a story that begins with the words swarmed by bees could have possibly ended up.

You’ve got this in your head now too, don’t you?

Ended By The Brute Of Another

When the time comes for me to leave this world, I would like for my exit to be a largely painless, peaceful affair. I have no interest in a demise such as being crushed beneath a tour bus, for instance. But if by some cruel twist of fate I should one day come to find myself so situated, I do hope that, were it appropriate, at some point during my ultimately futile struggle against my inevitable end that I would be able to take even the briefest of moments to stop, look around and drink in the beautiful irony of that bus belonging to a band called Squeeze.

Squeeze are currently on the North American road for their Tried, Tested and Trixies Tour, but were forced to cancel last night’s (September 3) scheduled show in Vienna, VA, after one of their tour buses tragically collapsed on top of a man, killing him.
As Washington, D.C.’s Fox 5 News reports, the man — whose identity has not been made public — was reportedly working under one of the buses parked outside the large outdoor Wolf Trap venue when a supporting apparatus malfunctioned, and the bus collapsed on top of him. After US Park Police officers were called at around 5 p.m. local time, he was pronounced dead at the scene.

The Dumbest Answer Is Often The Right One, The Hot Dog Edition

All of us, at least once in our lives, has asked ourselves one question. Why in the name of god do hot dogs come in packs of 10 but the damn buns come in packs of eight?

Turns out that the answer is as predictably annoying and stupid as you thought it was. The two different industries have just never seen fit to get their shit together. Nobody with skin in the game will likely ever say it out loud, but I’ll bet that’s deliberate. Forcing people to buy more stuff than they need means more money for them, so if they ain’t broke, why fix it?

The reasons for this are partly industrial and concern the different ways in which hot dogs and buns are processed. Meat is usually packaged in bulk, a pound at a time, and the average hot dog weighs 1.6 ounces, which comes out to 10 hot dogs. However, this division is at odds with hot dog bun production practices. 
According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, baking equipment used to create the buns often produces them in sets of four, which leads to the eight buns in packages that line the grocery store shelves today.

The Following Section Should Probably Be Removed Before You Begin Reading Aloud

A New Brunswick politician has chalked up a dubious world’s first for Canada by reading out AI prompts in an official speech.

In a June 9 speech to the legislative assembly, Progressive Conservative Bill Oliver read out the following line from a prepared text: “Here’s a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”

While it’s certainly not the first time a politician has been caught using an AI engine to write their speeches, this does appear to be the first time that the politician in question didn’t bother to remove the telltale signs of the act before reading the speech into the public record.

That video description is actually a wee bit misleading. He didn’t just do it once, he did it three times before it veeery sloooooowly dawned on him that something had gone extremely awry.

In the text Oliver read, there were three instances where his AI use was obvious, including where he said: “Here’s a more natural-flowing version of that section that reads like legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”
A few minutes later, Oliver read out these words: “Here’s a more developed and flowing version of the same section.” And a few minutes after that he said, “This section adds roughly … excuse me.”

The craziest part of this, obviously, is that it happened at all. But a big honourable mention has to go to the fact that his speech was so gripping and exciting that not a single person in range of it noticed what he’d done until somebody posted about it on Reddit weeks after the fact.

And since I’m sure you’re waiting for it, yeah, that’s what I thought of too.