I Hate Them Plenty Already, But There’s Always Room For More


Remember the other day when I said, basically, that TKO is a terrible company filled with shameless assholes who only care about money and Donald Trump? This video is all of that laid out in great detail. Don’t let the 92 minute length or the focus on boxing scare you off, because if you care about what’s happening to WWE or UFC or any of the other things that TKO is buying up and making shitty or even about exploitative monopolies in general, then you care about this. And I certainly wouldn’t blame you if you decided to stop watching your TKO product of choice when you’re done. We don’t have much power over what the billionaires do, but we do have that. That often feels like nothing, but it’s not.

You Can’t Spell Bad Radio Without AI

Pretty sure I just ran into my first case of egregiously awful radio AI.

Flipping around the dial and landed on Bounce Radio 99.5 Kitchener. Stayed there because I liked the song that was playing, which since I know someone will ask was “Don’t Wanna Fall In Love” by Jane Child.

Song ends, and the friendly human woman ostensibly running the show starts making conversation.

“There’s Jane Child.

“Canada Post has announced that it’s ending home delivery. Wow! Starts streaming on Crave this Tuesday.”

What in the world? The hell are you talking about? The end of home delivery streams on Crave?

That’s either the most horribly edited voice track I’ve ever heard or Bell’s cheap ass AI doing what AI does and screwing up a job it’s not suited for. I’m going for option B.

I Had To Make Sure. You Know Those Politicians Lie About Everything

Soldier shoots dead politician he was guarding
Contrary to the headline, the politician was in fact very much alive up until the shooting, which ended up being a murder-suicide. This is disappointing not just because murder-suicides are generally bad, but because I really wanted to know why the security guy hated the dude enough to make sure there wouldn’t be any of this resurrection shit.

A Ugandan national army soldier has shot and killed a government minister he was guarding.
Wilson Sabiiti shot dead retired Colonel Charles Okello Engola, deputy minister for gender and labour, at his home in the capital Kampala on Tuesday.
The soldier then turned the gun on himself and took his own life.
It is not yet clear whether there had been an argument between the two men. Sabiiti was assigned to the minister’s security detail a month ago.
Before he took his own life, some eyewitnesses said they saw Sabiiti walking around the neighbourhood and shooting in the air.

Come ON, Man. Be A Pepper. Just Once. Everybody’s Doin’ It, Dude

A couple things of note here:

  1. A drug investigation resulted in the arrest of a Bruce E. Huffer, which is what prompted me to open the post thingie.
  2. Check out what the cops confiscated in the process.

    During the investigation police seized meth, marijuana, blue pills believed to be Fentanyl, yellow pills identified as Gabapentin, orange tablets with various markings, smoking devices, scales, bagging materials, several phones, recording devices, cash books, ingredients to manufacture meth, a can of Dr. Pepper, and various other items.

    Everybody sing along!

    Is there something I don’t know about Dr. Pepper? Should I be giving it another try?

We’ll Be Back To the Important Stuff Right After This Brief Wrestling Match

I haven’t seen WrestleMania yet, and I’ve been doing my best to avoid wrestling news so that there might still be some surprises for me by the time I do. But one thing that won’t be a surprise? There were a lot of damn commercials and generally wasted time. Oh, and a bunch of the matches went short so that they could fit it all in.

The shortened matches bit is a new wrinkle, but I’ve been beating that drum for years, as you likely know if you’ve been here before or have talked wrestling with me elsewhere. WWE routinely does four hour shows that could have been done in under three, and three hour shows that might need an hour and a half, tops. And it’s only gotten worse since the company was sold a few years ago. It’s not unusual now to watch a show and literally be able to skip ahead fifteen minutes or more from the time the last important thing happened to when the next one begins. Everything is a plug now. Part of that is just how business works, but eventually it does get to the point of ridiculousness. For me, that point was reached long ago, but it seems like this weekend is when the rest of the world finally caught up.

Without even trying yesterday, I smacked into not one, but two pretty mainstream articles about it. That’s bad. Or at least it would be bad if the ghouls at TKO cared at all about anything other than money and Donald Trump.

For an event named WrestleMania, there wasn’t all that much wrestling taking place.

Fans of professional wrestling are furious with WWE after the two-night show – billed as their biggest annual showcase event of the year – featured nearly as much commercials as it did in-ring action.

According to several tallies online, Saturday’s Night 1 featured roughly 86 minutes of wrestling while Night 2 on Sunday had just 82 minutes – though the second night’s total broadcast length was shorter.
However, during Night 1, there was approximately 74 minutes spent broadcasting commercials.

I’ll offer the same advice I always do. Unless it’s your job, you don’t have to watch any of this live. No one is forcing you to sit through all that crap. This isn’t the old days. I’m probably going to watch both nights of Mania in the time it took you to watch one, and while I’ll be annoyed by imagining myself being you, I’ll for sure be much happier knowing that I’m not.

No Gloves? No Love!

I saw something really really stupid that I just can’t make sense of, so I had to write it down.

Picture this. It’s January in KW. Not only is it January, but it’s this past January, you know the one where if it wasn’t snowing its face off, it was impossibly cold. Someone walks into Walmart. They’ve come in from out of town and forgot to pack a pair of warm gloves, so they hope to pick up a pair. They walk and they walk and they walk. They search the aisles. Nothing looks like where warm gloves might be hanging around. So they approach an employee. “Can you tell me where I could find some gloves?” they say.

The employee says “We don’t have any gloves anymore.”

“You’re sold out?” the person asks.

“No. We put out our spring merchandise now.”

Excuse me? That’s how you know that the orders must come down from Arkansas, you know, where nobody needs warm gloves. Have they forgotten that people lose gloves mid season and might need to replace a pair? Gloves are things people don’t just wear to be fashionable. They keep our hands warm!

I’ve seen this with other stuff, like sandals, or shorts, or certain kinds of shirts. It’s annoying, but this just seems really stupid.

Can somebody explain why stores do this? I understand that it would be stupid to leave Christmas stuff out all year, or to have Easter candy just sitting there in the summer. I know that at the beginning of a season, people buy stuff for the upcoming season. But people always need stuff to keep warm when it’s freezing cold! It just doesn’t make sense.

Carin.Stubborn@Homemadebraille.com

For one reason or another, I’ve been strolling down memory lane through the blog a lot. Sometimes it’s because of the drugs our related posts plugin is on, and sometimes it’s just because. At any rate, I came upon this post where I described trying to make Braille alphabet cards myself. It’s funny how your perspective changes as you get older. I read the post and thought “Why on earth would I sit and make alphabet cards when they’re already available? Also, hey goofball, you’d have to get someone to write the print alphabet on them, so you’re not really saving yourself any time or money with these homemade alphabet cards, ya dumbass.”

It also struck me that I’m a slow learner, and here’s why. That post was written in 2010. But I have a story that I’ve never written down that involves me trying to manually braille out multiple copies of something, a story that had a bunch of the same struggles as this one did. This story happened in 2013 and I might as well write about it now. But if I learned from my 2010 experience, I never would have gone through it at all.

Way back in 2013, Some people from my awesome job were invited to a National Federation of the Blind convention so we could accept an award. Myself, my boss, and our chief operations officer at the time were the ones who were going to go.

Time was passing, and I thought everything was under control. Then one night, a couple of weeks before go time as I was peacefully sleeping away, my mind woke me with a start. In the middle of my dream, a gong sounded and a booming voice said “Braille business cards!” I knew exactly what I was trying to tell myself. I knew that my boss and I had business cards in Braille, but did the COO? And if he didn’t, did we have enough time to get them professionally done? We were going to a convention full of blind people. We had to have Braille business cards.

I asked him the next day, and he said “No. Do you know where I could get some?” Um…yes, but no. Yes, because I knew the place that the company used to do them. No, because they wouldn’t have them ready for the convention.

So I went into panic mode. In a fit of stupidity, I told his executive assistant that if she sent over some of his business cards, I would manually braille them. She did, and I tried. But my failures were even more spectacular than the ones on the alphabet card post. I had 0 margin for error, and I am not perfect. Eventually I had to admit defeat and come up with something else.

I remembered those index cards that I had on hand for making alphabet cards and thought I could probably get 3 business card-sized pieces out of each one. I could braille what would have gone on the actual business cards on the index cards. Then I would go to Staples and get them to cut them into business card-sized pieces for me. They wouldn’t have any print, but at least they were in Braille.

So that’s what I did. I brailled and I brailled and I brailled. I think I can probably still remember what I wrote on those index cards. That man’s name and email address are etched into my memory.

Staples did not disappoint me. Everything looked like business card-sized pieces. I did the best I could. I had also told my boss who was coming to the convention about my adventures. She said she would try to figure out a way to get the print on there.

She did end up coming up with a better solution, although she was impressed with how business card-like they looked. I don’t know where she found it, but she found a company that would somehow put braille on see-through paper with a backing you could peel off. So we brought real business cards, and stuck the sticky Braille to them, and we were all good. My crazy Staples creations were never used, but at least I had something.

My point is maybe, if I’d remembered what happened in 2010, I might have found the sticky Braille before needlessly slaving away on those pseudo-business cards. Oh well, I guess it makes for a good story.