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 Between that stupid, outdated concept wrecking my sleep and the atmosphere constantly switching between snow and tropics faster than a channel surfing cokehead, the whole damn month is a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.

Do Not Use This Service. But If You Must, Use It To Watch Kimmel

This is just silly.

The Trump administration, the same one that strongarms talk shows off the air because it doesn’t like being made fun of and shakes down media companies for not praising it enough is apparently so concerned about free speech around the world that it’s reportedly launching a new website to help foreigners view content banned by their governments.

It’s pretty clear what the game is here. Rather than a sincere effort to promote democracy and freedom of expression worldwide, it’s more of the conservative voices are being suppressed nonsense that these MAGA types are famous for. The main target seems to be anti hate speech laws in Europe, which should tell you everything you need to know.

The U.S. State Department is developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda, a move Washington views as a way to counter censorship, three sources familiar with the plan said.
The site will be hosted at “freedom.gov,” the sources said. One source said officials had discussed including a virtual private network function to make a user’s traffic appear to originate in the U.S. and added that user activity on the site will not be tracked.

Let us stop right here and join together in a rousing chorus of “Ocean Front Property”, because I ain’t buying that. Trusting a government not to track you is a bit like trusting the dingoes with your baby.

If you do need a VPN, start here.

The Trump administration has made free speech, particularly what it sees as the stifling of conservative voices online, a focus of its foreign policy including in Europe and in Brazil.
Europe’s approach to free speech differs from the U.S., where the Constitution protects virtually all expression. The European Union’s limits grew from efforts to fight any resurgence of extremist propaganda that fueled Nazism including its vilification of Jews, foreigners and minorities.

There’s certainly an argument that can be made about how those laws work and whether or not parts of them are overbroad, but when you get so butthurt by negative press that you investigate “The View”, you don’t get to make it.