The Ford Government Is Transparent, All Right

I’ve probably said this before, but I think it needs repeating. For a guy who says he doesn’t drink, Doug Ford sure governs like someone with a serious drinking problem. There are all of the bad decisions he’s loudly made and then regretfully walked back a few days later, but there’s also stuff like buck a beer, drinking in parks, beer in variety stores…and now whatever this is supposed to be.

Announced Tuesday, the program would see expanded bring-your-own event permits for municipally-designated cultural or community outdoor public events.
It would allow visitors aged 19 and older to bring their own alcohol for consumption in designated areas at events with a permit.

Starting this spring, the province’s move expands a program that was previously only available to organizers of live sporting events.
In a release, the province listed farmer’s markets, movie screenings, art exhibits and neighbourhood festivals as examples of the types of events that could benefit from the change.
Attorney General Doug Downey said the expanded permits will help save attendees money, lower costs for organizers, and contribute to local economies.

A couple of things here:

  1. Are there really that many people clambering to tailgate farmer’s markets and art galleries? Maybe I need to get out more or perhaps give my phone number to the entire world and then change the law so I don’t have to talk about having done so, but the number of times this sentiment has been expressed in my friend group is right around zero.
  2. They are right about one thing, though. These changes will absolutely save people money. Specifically the money they would have spent on attending all those events that make most of their revenue through food and drink sales and will now almost certainly have to scale back or fold should this catch on.

Great work as usual, guys. Cheers! 🍺

And I was going to do this in a separate post, but since I’ve already mentioned it, let us gaze upon the rock solid reasoning for changing the freedom of information act so that it excludes all of the information.

Doug Ford says he is tightening Ontario’s access to information laws to “protect” himself and his cabinet ministers from “communist China” and other hostile powers.
In his first public comments since the Progressive Conservative government announced it was excluding the records of the premier, ministers and parliamentary assistants and their aides from those released under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA), Ford defended the move.
“It’s about protecting cabinet confidentiality with the Ontario public service,” he told reporters in Brockville on Monday where he insisted he has nothing to hide.

“We’re following the other provinces, folks, this isn’t anything new. It’s not pulling a rabbit out of your hat,” he said.

“We’ve got to protect ourselves against the communist Chinese that are infiltrating our country, Canada, the U.S., everything into our education system, into high tech companies. That’s who we have to protect from, too. So it’s serious.”

He’s right, you know. Those damn Chinese have already forced Ford and his ministers to give large sums of money to their friends in the form of Skills Development grants! And if you can believe it, they even tried to get him to allow some of his different friends to pave over acres upon acres upon acres of protected land! Just imagine what would happen if the taxpayers, for whom they have great respect, were allowed to keep finding out about things like that. They would be so embarrassed! Maybe even embarrassed enough to finally admit that this last eight years has been a grave mistake and vote accordingly.

If China wants the contents of Doug’s phone and email, they’re going to get them. And they’re going to do it without filing a single piece of paperwork. He knows that, of course. He’s just hoping that we’re so busy tying one on at the library that we don’t.

It’s Just March


Sucker Punch Spring is certainly a much more appropriate name from a family friendly marketing point of view, but I’ve just always called this time of year motherfucking March. God, I hate March. You can’t trust it. It’s the weather thing obviously, but it’s also hard not to carry around a great sense of disgust for any month with a time change in it. Between that stupid, outdated concept wrecking my sleep and the atmosphere constantly switching between snow and tropics faster than a channel surfing cokehead, the whole damn month is a literal headache for me. Suck it, March.

Pop A Johns

We had this happen to us once. Not the hail of gunfire part, just the food delivered to the wrong house thing. And I’ll say without a hint of regret that we ate it. Granted it had clearly been sitting outside our door for a while before I happened to walk out and notice it, But even had we known sooner, we wouldn’t have been searching very hard for its rightful owner. If there’s an address or phone number written on it we’ll absolutely do our best to get in touch, of course. Or if you show up at our door within an hour or so looking for it it’ll still be there because we’re not total freaking vultures. But it’s not our job to canvas the neighbourhood, especially now that it’s so easy for people to order food at all hours of the day and night.

A pizza delivered to the wrong Detroit house led to a shootout Thursday night.
Sources say a pizza was ordered to a home on Penrod near Schoolcraft and the Southfield Freeway. However, that pizza was delivered to the wrong house, and the people who got the errant delivery ate the food.
When the people who ordered the pizza confronted the neighbors who ate the pizza, yelling turned to gunfire.
As many as 30 rounds were fired during the fight, and five people, including two 14-year-old boys, were shot.
One of the teens was shot in the abdomen, while the other was struck in the face. A 31-year-old man was shot in the face, neck, and leg, a 32-year-old man was shot in the leg, and an 18-year-old man was hit in the hand. All victims are listed as stable.

None of this sounds stable to me, but who am I to argue with a hospital?

Everything is Bigger In Texas, Including The Swarms

The usual hopefully Carin won’t scream too loudly in the office when she sees this sentence goes here.

Fire department crews responded to a report of a bee attack and arrived to find “what appeared to be millions” of bees attacking two people outside and also trapping two other people inside the home. 
The fire chief said Thursday that ‘millions’ was an exaggeration. 
Firefighters used foam to get the bees under control, allowing the victims, an elderly woman and a man in his 30s, to escape the swarm outside. 
The man was flown to a hospital in Fort Worth; the elderly woman was driven to a hospital in Cleburne with bee stings. It wasn’t clear how severe their injuries were. Both are expected to be ok.

I realize that Grandview Texas and Ontario Canada are different places, but up here they don’t tend to fly you to the hospital if they’re pretty sure you’re fine enough to wait for the regular ambulance, so I can’t imagine that this fella was in great shape.

Firefighters also had to break into the house to rescue two other people, described as a young child and an older man, because they couldn’t get through the bees to get out on their own. Neither was listed as having been taken for treatment, which is nice.

But the news wasn’t good for everyone. Two small dogs in a kennel outside were killed by multiple stings, and thousands of bees that couldn’t safely be removed from the home’s bathroom wall were killed by whatever it is one uses to euthanize thousands of bees that can’t safely be removed from a home’s bathroom wall.

You can read the full story and find more photos here if that’s a thing you would like to do.

Times No Money

As a blind person, I don’t spend much time thinking about fonts. Maybe I should as a blind person with a website, but that’s another discussion for another time. Right now, though, I am thinking about fonts, and even as a blind person, I do feel as though I am qualified to offer a bit of advice as it pertains to their proper use.

If you are going to sue your parents over a loan you made to them and are going to produce a document representing that they agreed to repay it in spite of their claims that the money was a gift or that the terms are different, maybe write that puppy in a font that existed in the year 2000 when the document was supposedly drafted and signed rather than in Calibri, which wasn’t created until 2004 and didn’t make it into widespread use until at least three years after that. This is especially crucial if your plan is to claim that it was printed at the time and that you had lost it in your business records until just a few days ago.

Why yes, sonny boy’s case was indeed tossed with prejudice.

Some Custody Required

A body-camera style photo of the exterior walkway of a large store with white columns and a line of red shopping carts along a beige wall. A shirtless adult man is crouched near a small bicycle, close to the shopping carts. On the ground nearby are a large red concrete ball, several cardboard boxes (one open with items inside), and scattered small objects. A gold seal in the lower-right corner reads “PINELLAS COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE” with “RICK STALY” above it.
Photo of Patrick Vandermeyden-Miller.

As we mention often, the importance of a getaway vehicle to a crime cannot be understated. But what happens when your crime is shoplifting and what you’re shoplifting *is* your getaway vehicle?

Flagler County deputies said it was reported that a man exited a Target on State Road 100 with a stolen electric scooter.

When deputies responded to the Target, they say the suspect, Patrick Vandermeyden-Miller, was trying to assemble the scooter in front of the store.

Police say that they also found drug paraphernalia in the man’s pockets, which goes a good way toward explaining things, I have to imagine.

Must Have Been Trash Day

This might be old news to some of you what with it having happened back in April of 2023, but if you, like me, don’t tend to follow the goings on in the Angels’ farm system generally or of the Double-A Rocket City Trash Pandas specifically, it’s probably new to you. But hell, even if it’s not it might be worth another look, because how many times are you going to watch a team lose a no-hitter like this?

It’s hard to decide what the worst part is here. It would be easy to say the walks, but for my money it’s either plunking four guys in an inning or buddy somehow totally missing that routine fly ball he was waiting under. Apologies to buddy for not knowing what his name is, but perhaps that’s for the best.

Also, I realize that clip was heavily edited, but how do that many people get hit without warnings being issued? I’m sure none of that was intentional, but you still want the other team to know you’re not putting up with any of that silly unwritten rules retaliation crap, I’d think.

the Pandas lost this game 7-5 to the Cincinnati Reds affiliated Chattanooga Lookouts, who probably thought this was a home game based on how many times they heard someone yelling “look out!”

This, by the way, is just one more reason why I passionately hate the entire concept of combined no-hitters. Unless your starter’s arm literally comes off and flies into the 17th row, leave him out there when he’s feeling it, for the love of god! I get protecting your pitchers, but pitching changes long ago blew passed merely being excessive. They hurt my enjoyment of the game even more than that stupid runner on second base in extras rule.

I’ve Got Emotions Improperly, and Where’s Arizona?

Hi there. It’s me, the weirdo who keeps disappearing. I have all sorts of ideas, but either my brain goes zap or time disappears. So I figured I’d start with something silly.

When Steve posted about the weird freedom.gov website, he mentioned the song “Ocean Front Property”. This made me think of some confused small kid logic I had. And it made me think about how little geography I understood.

The first time I heard that song, it was on the radio. I think I might have been slowly waking up when I heard it. But I was trying to understand the words. By the time it was done, I was very confused. “What is the point of this song, anyway?” I thought to myself. “This guy’s a selfish, mean jerk, and he randomly wants to talk about real estate? Why do we care?” It didn’t help that where it says “If you’ll buy that,” I thought it said “I’m not ruled by that.” So I thought the verses and the choruses were two separate thoughts.

This is the part where grown up me wants to laugh and laugh and laugh, because at this point, kid me had no idea where Arizona was, so I had no idea how sarcastic the song was being. I also had never heard the expression “I have a bridge I can sell you.” I don’t think I ever asked anybody, because I don’t remember peals of laughter, so that’s a good thing. But I will always remember just how confused I was that morning.