This Joke Kills Every Time

Remember the time when that gun shop owner shot his buddy’s face off for giggles? This is that, but with cops. I guess all that highly trained to make good, split second decisions stuff doesn’t apply when you’re off duty.

A 23-year-old Florida sheriff’s deputy was fatally shot by his fellow deputy roommate over the weekend, in what the sheriff described as a “clearly dumb and avoidable accident.”
Brevard County Sheriff’s Office deputy Austin Walsh was killed Saturday morning in Palm Bay by his roommate Andrew Lawson, Sheriff Wayne Ivey said in a Sunday news conference. 
The two were taking a break from playing online games with friends and were standing and talking together when Lawson, who believed he had unloaded his gun, “jokingly” pointed the weapon at Walsh and pulled the trigger, Ivey said, citing the probe by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Palm Bay Police Department. 
A single bullet was fired, struck Walsh, and killed him, officials said.

The sheriff said in his news conference that both were good kids, and that he prays there’s a lesson that can be learned from the tragedy.

I’m not an American, but having watched you guys closely for a good many years, the one lesson I’ve learned is that America doesn’t learn lessons about guns. Until that changes, I guess we’ll have to settle for remember to stand well out of range on open mic night.

You’d Better Not Make Him Number Forty-Seven

And now, it’s time for Carin and Steve have mind beams part…um…I suppose “FORTY-FIVE!”

I was just out in the kitchen washing dishes and listening to a podcast completely unrelated to music or politics or anything that would make me think about Donald Trump or Randy Rainbow when I suddenly thought to myself, I wonder what Randy Rainbow’s been up to lately. I’m surprised he’s not having a field day with all of Trump’s legal problems like everyone else has been.

A few minutes later I finish up, walk back in here, check my email, and Carin has sent me this.

Here and there somebody will try to explain it and now and then one of them is even half way coherent, but the whole Trump thing has been beyond me since it started, and I don’t even know what I’ll do if come next year he’s in the White House instead of the big house. In all seriousness, if I am ever so unhappy with the state of my life that a person as slimy, dumb, and generally off-putting as Donald Trump seems to me like a legitimate way out of that hole, please, get me help.

Hotel Little Wing

Another YouTube suggestion.

Laszlo Buring, who brought us Dire Straits doing Riders on the Storm, plays “Hotel California” if it had been covered by Stevie Ray Vaughan.

So there’s a couple of influences here, the most obvious one being SRV’s version of Little Wing. Then there’s some parts that a reminiscent of Riviera Paradise, and a little bit of Tin Pan Alley.

SRV’s version of Little Wing did not contain any vocals and that’s the way I decided to go with this one aswell. The chord progression of each verse is quite longs which gives you a lot of time to build towards that chorus and then back down to a verse, where it goes so quiet you can hear the hum of the guitar through the mix.

Hope you like it!

Indeed I do.

The Best Blind Joke I’ve Ever Heard

There’s a guy who, when we see each other, will sometimes try to hit me with a blind joke I haven’t heard yet. As any blind person who has ever had a conversation will tell you, however, this isn’t the easiest thing to do. After a certain point we’ve just heard everything, some of it thousands of times.

But the other day, buddy got me. And I’m not sure it’ll ever be topped.

Him: “I meant to tell you. I volunteered to help blind kids a couple weeks ago.”
Me: “Oh yeah? Where abouts?”
Him: “Never mind. It was a nightmare and I’m never doing it again.”
Me (surprised): “Oh. Shit. What happened?”
Him: “I guess I misunderstood the invitation. Turned out blind wasn’t an adjective. It was a verb.”

Well done, sir.

Stop And Bust A Move

I was rather amused by this when YouTube threw it at me over the weekend. Since it still sounds pretty good after 0 beers on a normal day, here you go.

If there’s a mashup artist out there as consistently good as Bill McClintock, I don’t know who it is.

Music used in this mashup:

Buffalo Springfield – For What it’s Worth
Young MC – Bust a Move
Def Leppard – Rock of Ages
Guns N’ Roses – Welcome to the Jungle
Van Halen – Jamie’s Cryin’

April’s Bloopers And The Leafs


Speaking of bloopers, how about them Leafs?

Yeah, low blow. One that I’m not sure how much they deserve considering that Auston Mathews had one of the best years a Leaf has ever had and they made the playoffs yet again. But then they did what they always seem to do, forget that they’re any good and peace out in the first round without much fuss. Beyond William Nylander who missed the first three games but would still have had no competition for series MVP if Joe Woll Didn’t exist, it’s a miracle that they made it all the way to game seven. I had them going out in six and thought I’d over estimated them by game five, for the record.

It’s a familiar pattern, and it’s getting old. And much as I hate to see a coach get fired when he’s got a record like Sheldon Keefe does (212-97-40), it’s probably time and I’m not going to argue against it this year like I have before. The playoffs are a problem, and when you’ve managed to win just one series in six tries, it’s pretty clear something isn’t working.

And speaking of things not working, I think it’s time to move on from this core four business. It’s gone about as far as it can go. I love that Marner and Tavares are Leafs and I genuinely hate it when my favourite teams trade away top shelf players while swearing up and down that they’re trying to win, but with both of those guys coming into contract years, if moves can be made, make them before either of them potentially walks for nothing next summer. Both of them (especially Marner), should net you a pretty big return.

The Leafs aren’t a team in need of a full rebuild, I don’t think. But they’re absolutely in need of some work. And if that means taking a couple of steps back to figure things out, that’s ok.

Music Playing Kid: Caleb Hayes, Eight-Year-Old Drummer

I’m sure I’ve said it before when I’ve posted one of these but it’s probably worth saying again. If I were eight and my favourite band said to me “Steve, come on up here and play a song with us”, I’d probably have lost my shit and totally screwed it up. but I’m not Caleb Hayes, who was eight when he got to do that with Evanescence at a soundcheck. He did great.

Caleb had his mind absolutely BLOWN when he was invited to play Take Cover with Evanescence in soundcheck! He wasn’t expecting it & even though Will’s Monster kit is huge in comparison to Caleb (4ft tall) he was still determined to crush it & give it his all! Enjoy 🥁
Thank you Will for making this happen 🙏Precious memories with an absolutely Awesome band🔥🥁🙌

Jiminy Christmas!

Police: Man uses Uber to rob bank, has driver wait to take him home
You will be shocked (Shocked I say!) to learn that our friend Jason Christmas here didn’t make a clean getaway, and not just because there’s nothing clean about dye packs exploding all over you, the money and the poor driver’s back seat. There’s also the small matter of being the guy who robbed a bank, was seen getting into an Uber when he finished doing that, the Uber being visible on the bank’s security footage and Uber having your name when you book a ride.

But lest you leave here today thinking that this fellow is a complete dope, keep in mind that he did give this whole escapade at least enough thought to realize that he should probably use Uber because his license was suspended and he didn’t want to get himself into any trouble.

According to police, they were dispatched to the Huntington Bank on Greenfield Road, just north of Nine Mile, just after 5 p.m. on Thursday on a report of a bank robbery. Police said Christmas took an Uber to the bank and asked the driver to wait as he went inside and robbed the bank. The driver was unaware of Christmas’ plans, police say.

The Uber driver took Christmas back to his apartment complex – the Heights of Southfield in Lahser – where police took him into custody just outside the apartment building.
In a bodycam video released by Southfield Police, Christmas is handcuffed and on the ground. Police asked him if he got shot because of “red stuff” that was all over him. The red stuff was from the dye packs that was put in with the money that the bank handed over to him.
The money, which police pulled from his pockets, was covered in red dye.

I’m Sick Of These Mute Muting Mutes In this Mute Muting Movie

If you’re a certain kind of person, the idea of a device that could cut all of the bad words out of movies and TV shows might sound just dandy to you. And if it could also swap those words out of the closed captions and replace them with nicer ones? Even better!

But I would hope that, even if you were that sort of person, you would spend 20-30 seconds thinking about it and come up with a fairly hefty armload of reasons why it almost assuredly wouldn’t work well, assuming it worked at all. And even if you didn’t catch all of the technical ones like the captions not being in sync with the dialogue or not being delivered in the singular way that your device is designed to intercept them, you would come up with the logical ones like what is this show about in the first place and does it have a setting for taming what’s on the screen as well?

This is the TVGuardian, a 1990s gadget that still appears to exist for some reason.

The implementation was kind of clever, I’ll admit. It would decode the closed captions baked into almost everything on television or VHS tapes as they were sent, scan them for terms in its database and then, when it found something, mute the audio momentarily while simultaneously replacing the offending phrase on screen with a tamer one (“Oh fuck” might become “oh man”, for instance) so that everyone but blind people could keep from losing the plot.

But of course, that’s what it does when it works perfectly, which it can’t, because it is a content filter. Like every other content filter, it only knows what it knows and can only work with what it’s given. So if you’re watching something live and the captionist is behind, cuss away, my friend! Ditto if it’s not live but the person doing the talking is speaking faster than the caption chunks are appearing. And there’s the context problem, of course. How have you been, Tyson and Rudy? And naturally, it can only change words, not subject matter. So even if naughty words aren’t ok with you, murder or porn or any number of other unsavoury things are going to have to be.

I’m sure glad my parents trusted me.

A Few Uplifting Words To Play Over Someone else’s Car Speakers

I didn’t wake up thinking that I was in a particularly down mood today, but I must be. I say that because I remember a time when I would read a story like this one here about a carjacker who was identified because he connected his phone to the car’s Bluetooth, say to myself something along the lines of “ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha look at this dumb fucker” and then I would move on with my life. But I saw this story today, and while there was most definitely a moment of “lol what a moron,” it was then followed quickly by a thought that hadn’t occurred to me before. We live in a world of Donald Trumps. Of Doug Fords. Of Marjorie Taylor Greenes. Of Danielle Smiths. Of Pierre Poilievres. How can any of us be sure that the stolen car Bluetooth numbskull won’t be making important decisions on all of our behalf one day whether we like it or not because half of us voted for it?

Have yourselves a wonderful day.

The victim told police two people followed her off a bus to her car and demanded her cell phone and keys.
Police found the car a couple of hours later and said the people who were inside hopped out and ran.
As the investigation unfolded police said a Westinghouse High School security guard identified one of the suspects, Darrell Cammon Jr., 19, of Wilkinsburg, from bus surveillance video.
Cammon is a former student at the school.
Police said another clue came from within the stolen car which showed a device named “Darrells iPhone” was connected to the vehicle.