You’re Sure It’s Closed?

Don’t get me wrong, you should never, ever do this. But counterpoint, what kind of bum ass, bush league supermarket closes the goddamn meat department while the rest of the store is still open? That’s some bullshit is what that is.

Court documents show that officers responded to the scene and ordered Gay to get out of his truck so they could arrest him. After he was taken into custody, an officer removed a loaded semi-automatic pistol with a bullet in the chamber from Gay’s hip holster.
In an interview, Gay said he went to Price Cutter to buy steaks. He told the “good man” who was helping him that they needed to weigh the steaks. However, the meat department was closed. Gay said at that point, he showed his gun “Just to say I’m not stealing. I need you here to help me to get a couple of these steaks. I’m not going to hurt you.”
The officer asked Gay why he thought the people in the store called police and told them he was threatening them with his gun.
“I don’t know,” Gay said in the interview. “I have no idea.”

Not surprisingly, the “good man” who was helping him had a different take on the situation.

According to him, when he informed Larry Gene Gay, 70, that he was neither allowed to bag his own merch nor be in the meat department at all and that there would be no assistance for him on this day, Gay introduced him to his friend. That friend was either the gun or a vocal coach, because there was suddenly a different tune being sung.

“Once he held the gun to my throat — pushed it into my throat — I decided to comply,” the “good man” told police.

Gay was charged with unlawful use of a weapon and armed criminal action, both felonies.

Thanks For Lunch, Anna Mae


I can’t remember exactly when I first went to Anna Mae’s, but I think it was far enough back in the 90s that my family hadn’t split up yet, so 95 or earlier. It was always such a treat to go. Still is, actually. I was in there last summer for lunch with my mom and it was as good as ever. Get yourself some broasted chicken, potato soup and a piece of pie (chocolate and apple are my favourites), and that’s a good day.

A gray speckled dinner plate holding two pieces of fried chicken, a scoop of mashed potatoes with brown gravy, and a small glass bowl of creamy coleslaw. The fried chicken pieces are golden-brown and crispy-looking, taking up the upper and right side of the plate. The mashed potatoes with gravy sit on the left side. The coleslaw in the glass bowl is placed near the bottom centre of the plate.
Anna Mae’s famous broasted chicken.

And remember to buy some stuff to take home on your way out. I always did. A lot of times I’d spend as much or more shopping afterwards than I did on my meal.

It also has a special spot in my heart because it’s one of the places that my grandpa loved to take people to eat. Whenever he got it in his head that we needed to go out, I always hoped he’d say Anna Mae’s and not the Chinese buffet he also had a thing for but whose two best qualities were close and cheap.
Founder of Anna Mae’s Bakery remembered for her legacy

Millbank’s beloved pie maker, Anna Mae Wagler, has died.
Wagler founded the popular Anna Mae’s Bakery and Restaurant, which shared the news of her passing in an Instagram post Thursday praising the legacy Wagler created with her vision and courage.
“She built something truly special even when many believed it wouldn’t succeed in a small town. Because of her determination and heart, we are able to continue sharing the delicious recipes and traditions that so many of you have come to love.”
Anna Mae’s Bakery and Restaurant was a destination for many, from cyclists and snowmobilers trekking to Millbank for a sweet treat to families flocking from all over Waterloo Region and beyond for a home-cooked Mennonite meal that was as good a value as it was tasty.

Wagler, born in 1952, built the restaurant on Perth Line 72 in 1991 with her husband, Melvin, after more than a decade of selling baked goods from her home. The restaurant grew quickly, with the demand taking it from seven tables and a counter to seating for nearly 200, and it soon became one of the largest employers in the village.
“A good dollar value and good product for the customer, that’s my concern,” Wagler told a Record reporter in a 1993 article celebrating the restaurant’s phenomenal growth, overcoming a recession, a rural location rejected by a feasibility study, little advertising and no previous restaurant experience.

She’s Not Running Against You Anymore, Dude

I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I either understand or particularly care about local Mississauga politics. I just want you to listen to this dipshit.

Premier Doug Ford says if former Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie tries to come back as Mississauga mayor he “will send an army down here” to help incumbent Carolyn Parrish.

“It was an absolute disaster under Bonnie Crombie,” Ford said Wednesday at a housing construction site in Mississauga where he was joined by Parrish.

“You know something, I never get involved in municipal elections, but I will send an army down here to make sure I support Mayor Parrish,” said Ford.
“So what I say to mayor Bonnie Crombie: bring it on, let’s go, we’re ready,” he said.

Yes, this is indeed the same Mr. Never Gets Involved In Municipal Elections who once dramatically changed the city of Toronto’s electoral boundaries and council composition smack in the middle of an active campaign for no damn reason. If you want to argue that he did have a reason, that’s fine. Perhaps he did. It’s good now and then to take a careful look at how governments function and see if they can be made more efficient and cost effective. But nothing about that was careful. He had a bug up his ass and the newfound power to do something about it, and so at the worst possible time, that’s what he did.

The more things change, something something something.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one day in the not too distant future, Bonnie Crombie wakes up and finds that she suddenly lives in a different city thanks to a new law redefining what counts as Mississauga.

That’s a joke…I think. It’s awfully hard to tell sometimes.

The Fictional Brands Archive

This feels handy, so I’m going to stick it here in case I ever need to refer back to it.

Maybe I’m studying for a trivia game. Or maybe I’m a weird old guy who doesn’t watch many popular shows and movies and needs a way to figure out what in hell the rest of you are talking about when you make a reference. Who can say? 😉 Whatever the reason, this is the Fictional Brands Archive, a database of businesses featured in movies, video games and TV shows. You can filter it by categories or simply browse it in alphabetical order. There’s also a spot where you can submit ones they’ve missed, a group which as of now includes two I actually know off the top of my head, the Peach Pit from “90210” and Vandelay Industries from “Seinfeld”.

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.