I’ve Heard of Music In Your Soup. What About Music In The Road?

I was looking up some stuff for another post that I want to do, and I discovered something neat that I never knew about. Apparently, there are some roads in the US that have been built with grooves in them, so if you drive at the right speed, 45 miles per hour, they sing a song! Seriously! That would have taken one heck of a lot of work.

Here’s a list of five of them, although some of them are closed, and some of them were built less well.

In case that page goes splat, here is the list.

  • PALMDALE, CALIFORNIA
    R. Lee Ermey Musical Road
    The road plays 30 seconds of the Marine’s Hymn when driving over the grooved pavement.
  • ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
    Musical Highway
    If drivers cross the rumble strip on this stretch of Route 66 at just the right speed it plays “America the Beautiful.”
  • “Singing Runway” at the Abandoned Disney World Airport
    The only runway directly into the magic kingdom has been closed since 1972, but it still sings to you if you drive fast enough.
  • LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
    ‘Remnal of a Senging Chave’
    Behind legendary Meltdown Comics is a marker for an engineered musical roadway of the Tehachapi, the great road builders of Kcymaerxthaere.
  • LANCASTER, CALIFORNIA
    Civic Musical Road
    Finale of “William Tell Overture” can be heard as drivers pass over grooves in the road.

Because I was way too curious, I found videos showing 3 of these roads. Two of them are in the same video, and there is a lot of description of how it works.

And here’s one about the Route 66 bit outside of ALBUQUERQUE, although it seems like there’s also one in Springfield, Missouri that might work better.

I have also learned that there are musical roads in other countries. How have I never heard of this?

And I learned all of this while looking for something else. What a rabbit hole!

Dumpster And Donation Box May Start With The Same Letter, But They Are Not The Same

It gets hard sometimes when you have to pay attention to the news, but no matter what, I always do my best to hold on to my belief that in spite of what feels like literally everything now, people are, over all, good and well-meaning. And while I’m sure that’s true of most of the folks donating to these people’s wildfire relief store, the mere thought that enough folks haven’t been that they felt the need to take time out of their lives to say knock it the hell off kinda makes me want to go back to bed forever.

The store in Penticton is stocked with donations from the community such as racks of men’s and women’s clothing, along with school supplies and personal hygiene items evacuees need to rebuild their lives.
But while Patan is grateful for every contribution, he and his volunteers have noticed some people treating the store as a place to dispose of goods that are better suited for the landfill.
“We opened a box together and it was half-used bars of soap, half-used makeup,” Patan said.
In one case, a shirt donated to the store reeked of cat urine.
“We would open bags where, you know, you had to take it outside because it smelled so bad,” he said.

He added, volunteers were making daily trips to the landfill just to dispose of these items.
Patan said he doesn’t believe people are donating maliciously, but said the issue escalated to where he felt he had to speak up.
“Where is that fine line of what should we be giving?” he asked.
He posted online, asking people not to use the store as a space to clean out their homes. He said that after everything evacuees have lost, they still deserve to feel human.

It’s worth pointing out that the person who started the store also lost his family home in one of the fires. That he could go through that and still find the time, the energy and the will to try to help so many others is an amazing thing. Also amazing, to me at least, is managing to kindly say that he doesn’t believe there’s malicious intent involved in some of these drop-offs. I’m not sure I could manage that, to be honest.

If you’d like to donate something better than the soap from your ass or a cat piss shirt (Who has one of those just lying around?), here’s how you can help.

TOTAL-LOSS FAMILIES FREE STORE
& DONATION DROP-OFF:
2130 Government Street, Penticton
10 AM – 4 PM • 7 DAYS A WEEK
Our Community GoFundMe is another important way to help:
https://gofund.me/b99d9854c
It is helping fill the gaps for total-loss families who may be uninsured, underinsured or discovering things simply aren’t covered.

It’s Not Just The Municipal Sector They Don’t Understand, I Assure You

Great news, you guys! Based on some of the comments in this anonymous survey of municipal administrators, I think I might be qualified to work for the city! Well, at least if banging on about most of this same stuff for almost a decade counts towards the standard.

The survey, conducted by government relations firm StrategyCorp, compiled anonymous reflections from a sample of 32 CAOs, allowing them to freely discuss the behind-the-scenes relationship with the provincial government.
Top municipal civil servants described a government that’s filled with ambition but falls short on implementation, rushes through the consultation process, and is often “thin-skinned and unforgiving” when faced with criticism.
“We have to tread very carefully in our response to anything that the province is doing,” one CAO said. “Our mayor is cognizant of that.”
Another city administration put it more bluntly: “the province doesn’t accept dissent, and you are punished for it.”

Some CAOs interviewed for the report said the province “doesn’t understand the municipal sector,” leading to “far too many unintended consequences.”
“I think [the provincial government] is an absolute disaster,” one CAO said. “It’s knee-jerk reactions with no analysis, no policy, no business case.”
Another CAO labelled the Progressive Conservatives as a “spaghetti government.”
“You just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. If it sticks, then you draft regulations. If it doesn’t stick, you don’t.”

Ultimately, some said, decisions are made without local guidance.
“Changes appear to be made by a very small group of people without real consultation or analysis on what the impact will be,” one CAO said.
“We see that when they must be rolled back.”

“I get nervous whenever Doug Ford steps up to a podium because I have three months’ work ahead of me whenever he opens his mouth,” One CAO said.
“There have been 8 years of constant change.”

As AI Whitney Houston Might Say, I Bulorve That Choldreninen Are Our Fuviture

Tell me again about how AI is the future, because it sure as shit ain’t the present.

A school in Kentucky sent students home with a bound agenda that included absurd errors clearly made by AI. The periodic table was nonsense. The map of the U.S. lists the state of Illinois as “Vitoiis,” and Kentucky is listed as “Venecky.” There’s an extra planet called Marc, and Saturn is listed as “Sature,” among countless other gibberish errors.

Between this and Africa’s new geography, things are going super great.

A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a State Department presentation at a global conference taking place in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attendees who took screenshots and posted them online.
Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the State Department’s new health agreements.

A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company said it was investigating the report.
The State Department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
The map showed Nigeria, where the U.S. currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara Desert. Mozambique, which is in southeastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Ivory Coast in West Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.

Seriously, how does stuff like this even happen? Not the part where it escapes into the world, that part is easily explained by dumb, lazy humans. I’m talking about the bit where the AI spits it out to begin with. If a technology is trained to function based on all of the world’s best sources of information and is supposed to be smart enough to handle every aspect of our lives, why does it still routinely go so spectacularly wrong in spite of all the years and money that I’m constantly told have been poured into making it not suck?

Close!

The conversation Steve and I had about empanadas reminded me of a time when I asked Google something, and I think the AI, if it could, would have looked at me and said “Are you that stupid?”

If you ask Google what is the difference between two things, even if they’re not that similar, the AI will be generous and find some similarity. For example, when reminding myself what empanadas looked like, I asked to compare empanadas with samosas. It first said they were different, but they were both pastries with filling, and went about describing them. But in another case a few months ago, the AI just said “no!” and I felt really dumb. Here’s why.

Back a while ago, Dairy Queen had a sweet and spicy menu they were pushing. One of the items was a spicy lemonade. When I heard the commercial, I thought it said the lemonade was made with tahini. That was the only word in my vocabulary that even came close. So I pondered and I wondered and I thought. I don’t consider tahini spicy, but how on earth would that even go with lemonade? So I asked other people. And they hadn’t noticed the commercial and were also perplexed. I continued talking to other people, making the old broccoli ice cream joke about how lemonade and tahini are both good but you wouldn’t put them together,

and laughing and laughing because I thought I was so so funny. If you listened, you might have heard the sound of me digging myself a hole. Dig dig dig.

Here’s why. I thought the stuff in the lemonade was called Tahini. It is in fact called Tajín. You can see that this is not even close to tahini. *thump* Carin goes in the hole. Now all these people who watched me make dumb jokes either already think I’m a moron, or will as soon as they see what the name of the stuff actually is.

Hoping to redeem myself just a little bit, I asked Google, “are tahini and Tajín related?” This, or something similar, is what it said:

No, tahini and Tajín are not related. They are completely different foods from different parts of the world, and they only share a similar sound.
📌 The Main Differences
Feature
Tahini
Tajín

A creamy seed paste (like sesame butter)
A dry chili-lime seasoning powder…

Things have become a bit more generous since I googled this last time. At least now, the Google AI acknowledges their names share a similar sound because the j in Tajín is pronounced with an h and the i is pronounced with a long e. Back when I did it, it felt like the AI was just like “Nope. I don’t know what planet you’re on, stupidface. I can’t even imagine where you’re coming from at all.”

So yeah, I’ve learned something, and a bunch of people probably wish I knew stuff. Or maybe they learned something too, and we can feel silly together. I hope it’s that.

A Lot Of People Are Saying I Make The Best Mexican Food

I’m familiar with TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) and NACHO (Not A Chance Hormuz Opens) as food acronyms to describe Trump’s approach to policy. But apparently I’m behind the times, because I was unaware of two more that people have been using. One of the benefits of having no social media, perhaps. Anyway, they’re fun, and just complicated enough that I know I’m not going to remember them, so I’ll stick them here for my benefit and yours.

One of the clever ways to deal with the unprecedented and disruptive U.S. presidency of Donald Trump is to make up acronyms using Mexican foods.
This has given us TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out — to reflect the U.S. president’s tendency to escalate a situation before retreating once the economic and political costs become too heavy.

Then there was EMPANADA — Everybody Makes Promises And Nobody Actually Delivers Anything — used to describe countries making outrageous and unachievable trade promises in the hope of avoiding the worst of Trump’s tariffs.
More recently, NACHO — Not A Chance Hormuz Opens — was popular. The vital Strait of Hormuz did sort of reopen after Washington and Tehran signed an interim peace deal on June 17. But even that partial relief is now in question after Trump said on Wednesday that the MOU was “over,” reviving the risk that the waterway could again become a pressure point.
Perhaps the best Mexican food acronym for Trump is TAMALES, standing for Trump Always Messes Around, Leaves Everybody Shafted.

Please Stop Ruining Corn On The Cob For Everyone

There’s some internet wisdom I’ve heard over the years that says that when a headline contains a question, the answer to that question is almost always no. Quite often, it’s correct. But here’s one of those almosts I was talking about.
Is It Rude To Shuck Corn Before Buying? We Asked an Expert

This has to be a city people thing, because I never noticed anyone doing it until I grew up and had to start living in cities and buying my own groceries. But now that I’m here, I can’t count all the times that Carin or I has had to sometimes rather firmly protest to get whomever happens to be helping us to stop trying to husk our damn cobs! It’s bad enough when they’re purchased, but sometimes they’re not even our damn cobs yet! And you wouldn’t believe how many of them are completely taken aback by this, as if *we’re* the ones from another planet.

Corn on the cob is not that hard. If you want to inspect it first, just pick it up and lightly molest it. Does it feel firm and heavy? If yes, you’ve likely found a good one. Then you buy it, you bring it home, and when you’re ready, you husk it and put it in the pot. Note that I said when you’re ready, because that’s important. Removing your husks and then letting it sit is a fine way to make sure that you’ll be eating worse corn.

And of course husking in public is rude. First of all, husking corn can be messy as all hell, so you should be doing it outside or indoors in a place where you can clean up after yourself. It shouldn’t be left to the already overworked people at the store or the market. And what makes you think that it’s ok to do this in the first place? Would you unwrap a cut of meat and then put it back? Would you peel a bunch of bananas and then decide you’re not taking them? That’s the sort of thing that would get you thrown out of any decent store. So for that reason alone, just don’t.

We reached out to Rob Shenot, owner of Shenot’s Farm and Market, who shared that while his grandfather, who was, in Rob’s words, the original corn king of their farm, was very annoyed by customers doing this very thing, he understands that some customers want to inspect before they buy. So, what takes the action from understandable to rude? This shift happens if the customer doesn’t take the ears that they’ve opened. As Shenot notes, “We don’t know how often our customers scrub under their fingernails, and if you’re not a professional corn picker, there’s a good chance you’ll pop some kernels at the top of the ear.” This affects the quality of the corn, as “the husk is a great protector against bruised kernels that also preserves moisture in the ear.”
The note about quality and how husked corn’s quality goes down is an oft-repeated point when arguing against husking corn before buying. It is strongly recommended that corn should only be husked right before being cooked or eaten—this keeps the kernels sweet, bright, and moist. And if you shuck corn and don’t buy it, it will dry out rapidly, most likely get rejected by other shoppers, and become part of the staggering food waste stats.

If you want to see this in action, go to a store and instead of buying fresh, unhusked corn, grab a couple of those plastic trays full of mostly husked cobs. They’re almost always under-sized and tough, not to mention that half of them look like they’ve been through a war.

I’m Proud To Introduce Our New Lead Detective

There was a ridiculous story back in February that we never got around to posting, but since there’s an update, let’s fix that now.

A police officer, clearly one of the department’s best and brightest, pulled a woman over for texting and driving because he had seen her holding a phone in her right hand. Normally that would be great, but there was just one small problem. She didn’t have a right hand.

In spite of the very obvious hole in his case, he ticketed her anyway, to the tune of $116.

In may, which seems entirely too long, the department asked that the citation be dismissed due to insufficient evidence, which…well…yeah. Evidence really doesn’t get much more insufficient than this.

And now, in August which also seems entirely too long, comes word that the Deputy in question, Yosvani Quesada, has been given a verbal reprimand. Verbal? Like not written down and stuck in his file forever? That oughta teach him.

Other than police officer or President of the United States, I’d love to know where I can find a job where no matter how terrible I am at it I can just keep failing up and up and up and up.

But at least this woman, who if my own disabled person experience means anything probably goes through more than her fair share of crap in an average day thanks to the general public, doesn’t have to pay for his incompetence.

According to a summary of a PBSO Internal Affairs report, PBSO Deputy Yosvani Quesada has received a verbal reprimand for the incident on February 11 when he pulled over Kathleen Thomas, a Lake Worth Beach resident, for texting while driving.
Thomas, who has only one arm, got a $116 ticket. The traffic stop in the 1800 block of North Dixie Highway in Lake Worth Beach was recorded on Deputy Quesada’s body-worn camera. Deputy Quesada told Thomas he saw her holding a cell phone in her right hand while driving, even though he could clearly see during the traffic stop that she had no right hand.
The Internal Affairs report says: “Deputy Sheriff Yosvani Quesada misunderstood the legal elements necessary to establish a violation of wireless communication, device hand held while driving-first offense.”

Here, Have A Multilingual Earworm

I have so many posts that I want to write that it’s kind of overwhelming, and my brain starts spinning, and then no posts come out. For one, I have accumulated over a year’s worth of sleep-talking in the comments that I need to get written up. And then there are the other posts that take lots of time and thought and I think about them and my brain runs away. So I thought I might do something small to maybe at least have done something.

Last month, we went on a trip to celebrate Sukie’s 10th birthday. Yes, that kid is 10. On our way there, we rode with my brother, his wife, and Kliks and Bricks of course. So we listened to some very kid-centric playlists all the way there and back. At least my brother has good taste, so they didn’t drive us bonkers.

There was this one song that he played a bunch that has stayed in my head, and whenever I hear it, I smile and it makes me all warm and fuzzy.

I can’t even put it into logical words. I had first thought it had been written for the World Cup, but it appears it was not. And they left out a few countries, but the point is there. I just like the concept that all around the world, when we get down to it, we’re not all that different. We speak different languages, but we’re not a bunch of aliens. “How are you” may be said in different ways, but it’s still the same question.

There was another part of me that thought about how many places use a similar version of the question and made me think about colonies and that influence…because even warm fuzzies can still be tinged with realism, I guess. Or maybe I’m a great big Debbie Downer.

I had to laugh at one point because a crazy part of me was trying to memorize the whole thing, taking in all the different how are yous, and Steve either knows me too well or sensed what I was doing because he said “There’ll be a quiz on this later.”

Anyway, here’s your sappy song. Enjoy. And don’t be surprised if it follows you around.

Somebody Hire This Man, Because This Was A Home Run

I don’t know how much Lewis Kalb paid to win this call an inning of baseball on the radio auction, but judging by how well he did, I think the Phillies ought to be paying him. It’s hard to believe that it is, but if this really is the first time he’s ever done commentary, it’s amazing. Other than using the word “delivers” too often for my taste, he was pretty well perfect. He’s got the voice of an old school baseball announcer. He knew stats. He described everything like you’re supposed to because it’s the radio. He went back and forth between answering the questions the other announcers were asking him and calling the pitches without missing a beat. Seriously, he nailed it. If he wants one, some team somewhere could do a whole lot worse than giving him a job.