Busting A Nutley

A substitute teacher from of all places, Nutley, New Jersey, is facing several charges after he is alleged to have been twice caught teaching anatomy when he was supposed to be teaching things that were not that.

Charging documents do not say how many students were in the room during the Feb. 1 incident, or if it was during class.
On March 10, four students told the school that Dunn was acting “weird” during their digital media class, and that they saw Dunn exposing himself and masturbating at his desk while looking at female students, charging documents say.
When Dunn noticed the students looking and pointing towards him, he asked, “Are you guys all right?,” documents say.
Dunn was charged with endangering the welfare of a minor for the Feb. 1 incident, and four counts of endangering the welfare of a minor and one count of lewdness for the March 10 incident.

Good of him to ask if everyone was ok. You never lose those caring teacher instincts, I guess.

The first incident is said to have been filmed by a student, so I wish him well with that come court day. Then again the justice system is kind of weird as hell, so who knows.

The Night Santa Went Crazy

Ever since I got my CPAP machine that I call Santa Claus, I’ve been having a lot more dreams. The rush of dreams is almost as pronounced as when we got our new mattress…which is nearing the end of its days, I think. At least some of these dreams are just amusing and they aren’t all as terrifying as the ones caused by the dreamons. I wanted to write a few of them down.

The one that’s the hardest to remember simply consisted of me living my life, and randomly it would be accompanied by Spike Jones music or noises. So I would kick something, and there would be this loud metal clang. Or snowflakes would fall on my head and make that whistling noise that meant something was falling. Or I would finish doing something, and that dramatic song ending music would play.

Then I had this dream that I called a meeting about going to the CSUN conference, and then missed the meeting that I called!

On another night, I had this elaborate dream where I was at a train station and ran into a bunch of old friends I hadn’t seen in a while. At one point, somebody’s guide dog came up behind me and sniffed my butt. Then we tried to make it so we were all in the same train car, and nobody could figure out how to do that, and I called somebody a genius ball, and had to explain it. Somehow, we all ended up back at our apartment building trying to catch a cab back to the train.

Tansy came into my dreams. That was a nice one. She was all fluffy and soft and full of beans. She just stayed with me for a while, rolled around on the floor shukhing and being a goof, and then had a big sloppy drink of water.

There was one I can’t remember super well, but it involved being in the mall without my cane. That would not be a good plan.

In another dream, I was in this dingy apartment full of hackers, and people from work. All I can remember about it was there was music everywhere, and whenever a certain guy would come in, he would step on my toe. There were mattresses everywhere and people would be on computers until they fell over in a dishevelled heap. There were pizza boxes and random takeout containers all over the place and I don’t know why I was there.

One of my more disturbing dreams involved me being Bobby from the “Low Men in Yellow Coats” story by Stephen King. I was reliving the last day, when he’s running away from scary guys and he sees the lost pet signs on the telephone poles. And then it cut to the scene where he calls the number on the lost pet signs. I hadn’t read that story in years, and I had to go find it again to see how well I remembered it.

Travel must be on my mind. I have had two travel dreams, neither of them very good. Last nights was just weird. I was on a plane with an older lady I know and what my dream imagined her goddaughters would look like, and some of their friends. When we got out, we grabbed our carry-on luggage and had to run out of the airport quickly. I wasn’t even sure if my stuff got grabbed. Then we went to a restaurant, and one of the friends was constantly on the phone and said we had to give some guy named Carlo and some friends a ride. But they also brought little dogs that they were trying to pretend were service dogs. Then when the meal was over, they all ran out of the restaurant and didn’t wait for me. Then some cop came in and cleared out the whole restaurant and helped me find my friends, don’t ask me how. They told me that if they didn’t get out, the waitress was going to kill us. So nice of them to leave me behind. Then since Carlo and some others were in the car, there was hardly any room for me and I was all squished into the back seat. And there was some weird conversation where the goddaughters were trying to give my friend a hard time about trusting too many people, and she was trying to explain that if you’re blind, you kind of have to trust people sometimes. Then I woke up and a weird Raffi song was in my head.

But the weirdest travel dream, and the one that made me laugh the hardest was the one about my trip to CSUN. My colleague and I were in the airport and it was almost security time. We got to the bins and I was making sure I had my bin and was starting to take my shoes off. There was a woman next to me so I was trying to make sure I had my hand on my bin. Suddenly, a great big TSA guy came running over saying “Ma’am! Ma’am! Don’t use that bin! Ma’am!” I finally asked if he was talking to me or the woman next to me, and he said “Both of you! Somebody urinated in all the bins!” We asked him what we were supposed to do and he said “We’re trying to get the guy’s insurance to pay for it.” I was about to comment that that will take a while, when I woke up.

Yup. This is what my mind is busy doing when I’m hooked up to ol’ Santa. What the heck? It doesn’t happen every night, but it happens often enough. Who knows what will come next, but one thing’s for sure. my wish is still coming true.

The RCA SelectaVision: The Forgotten Format That Maybe Could Have Changed Media As We Know It

If you’ve got an hour or so to burn and you’re interested in technologies that didn’t end up working out, you might enjoy this deep dive into RCA’s SelectaVision, an attempt to modify a record player to make low cost home video possible.

It was a pretty neat idea that made a good bit of sense when they came up with it in the mid 1960s. Vinyl records were orders of magnitude cheaper and simpler to mass-produce than magnetic tape was, so if there was ever going to be a consumer friendly way of getting movie players into people’s homes, this was probably going to be it. And had it come out anywhere close to on schedule, it might have been.

Unfortunately, thanks to technical hurdles and a whole lot of corporate dysfunction, the Capacitance Electronic Disc and it’s accompanying player didn’t see the light of day until 1981, by which point companies had solved a lot of the troubles with tape and gone into the VCR business. One of those companies, interestingly enough, was RCA. They even marketed their VCRs under the name SelectaVision for a while thanks to some deals they made in Japan. But they released the CED anyway.

For obvious reasons they didn’t sell nearly as many players as they had hoped, but the people who did buy them made up for some of that shortfall by buying a lot of movies. All of this was too little, too late, of course. The VCR was off to the races and as much as some people liked it, there wasn’t enough of a market for clunky, damage-prone discs that tended to get stuck while you were watching them to keep the concept alive beyond 1985 or so.

It’s interesting to think about how much different the world might have been had RCA had its shit together. Had they released this in the early 70s like they were supposed to and beaten beta and VHS to the punch, would we have ever had the ability to record live TV? These SelectaVision machines were players, not recorders. Had they become the standard, chances are we would have been buying movies and TV seasons from the start. If RCA and other powerful companies were raking in money hand over fist that way, it isn’t a given that they would eventually add recording functionality. Where’s the incentive? And from there you wonder about all sorts of things. DVRs, other media formats, rentals, and on and on and on. But RCA did not have its shit together, and the failure of SelectaVision kind of ended up torpedoing the entire operation, something that would have seemed unthinkable years earlier.

Porcha-Potty

To borrow a phrase from Carin in her sleep that one time, them old guys, shittin’ everywhere! I don’t know why he did that.

For unknown reasons, the Florida Man, 64, walked “fully naked” up the driveway of his next-door neighbor and proceeded to defecate atop a glass table on the victim’s porch, according to police.
Carlyle was arrested Friday afternoon for criminal mischief and booked into the county jail on the misdemeanor charge.
Carlyle, cops say, was captured relieving himself in broad daylight “on two separate angles of the victim’s home security video footage.”
When officers arrived at the Clearwater crime scene, Carlyle was spoken to “through the door of his RV camper and he was still visibly naked and highly uncooperative.”

As noted, there is nothing offered in the way of explanation for why he might have felt the need to do this. All we have to go on (aside from the table, obviously) is that we’re dealing with a fellow who was, at the time of the dirty bombing, free on $11,500 bond after having been arrested a few months earlier for allegedly driving drunk and shooting guns into a lake near his house. We’re not sure why he did that either, come to think of it. Maybe he just really dislikes his neighbourhood.

Finally, We Agree On Something

I don’t know if that something is that this dude we live with has horrible taste in music, that the rest of the complex wants and needs to hear our argument more than whatever stupid song this is or that we’re both just curious enough right now about how it feels to stab a guy, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.

The 29-year-old victim told the couple – a 21-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman – to keep it down when he heard them arguing around 3 a.m. inside the apartment on Perry Avenue near East 205th Street in Norwood, police sources said. 
At some point, the victim turned on some music to compete with the couple’s shouting, according to the sources.
That sent the couple into a rage – and they stabbed the victim in the neck and chest, cops and the sources said. 
Responding officers found the victim unconscious and unresponsive, and he was pronounced dead on scene by EMS, police said.

Breaking News Is Broken

This has been slowly driving me around the bend, so I had to write it down. Plus I wanted to know if other people felt the same. People have lost touch with the meaning of the phrase “breaking news.”

They use it on news that isn’t that important. Some update on the state of the economy doesn’t need the “breaking news” tag. And just because it just came out doesn’t mean it’s breaking news. It’s *news*, and that’s all.

They use it on news that isn’t even new. I especially noticed this on news stations like 570 News when COVID was new. They would play the “breaking news” music, and then read a story that they read an hour before.

And they use it in news alerts apps whose job is to send people news alerts. So, they’re not interrupting anything to bring the news. I feel like using the term “breaking news” on the internet is just dumb. As soon as it’s published, it could be breaking news because that’s how the internet works. They aren’t trying to interrupt something or have it arrive ahead of schedule.

I guess this trend has been going on for a while, but I only noticed it after 2020 was being 2020. Every time I saw the words “Breaking news”, something really bad was happening. So now, when I see “Breaking news” for something trivial, I brace myself for the worst, and then I get mad. Logically, you would think I should be relieved, but I only find myself irritated.

This Slate article does a pretty good job of tracking it to way earlier than I noticed it. At least I haven’t lost my mind about what “breaking news” meant.

It sucks that there doesn’t seem to be much hope of the phrase regaining its meaning. Hopefully it doesn’t get to the point where it’s absolutely meaningless to people. At least now, I still half pay attention in case it is something important. What if we reach the point where no one even bats an eye?

The World Could Use A Better Bail System. And More Barbecue Sauce

If there’s one place where you would figure that a lack of barbecue sauce wouldn’t be a concern, it’s a barbecue restaurant in Texas. You would be wrong, it turns out. But if there’s one place where a lack of barbecue sauce would end in a shooting, Texas would be a pretty good guess. A correct one, too.

The incident occurred at the Dickey’s BBQ Pit on Shady Drive in northeast Harris County in January.
According to Click 2 Houston, Thomas picked up his to-go order and left the restaurant. He then called the restaurant “angry and upset” because “they did not give him enough BBQ sauce in his to-go order,” Harris County District Attorney’s Office spokesperson Jill Wells said. Employees tried to appease Thomas and fix the situation, but he angrily went back into the restaurant.
“Now, he’s verbally threatening them (saying), ‘I’ll come back and shoot up the place,'” Wells said.
Thomas initially left the restaurant, but he never left the parking lot. Wells said Thomas waited for the employees to leave. He followed the workers down the road and shot into their car.
“He strikes one of the complaint victims five times, breaking a bone in their arm. The other victim, thank goodness, was not shot,” Wells said.

As if this wasn’t ridiculous enough, Andre Thomas was out on bond and facing several felony cases at the time of this incident. But don’t worry America, you’re not the only country that can’t quite get a handle on this whole bail thing.

McKenzie has been prohibited for life since 2018 from possessing any firearm, said Carrique.
Carrique also said McKenzie was charged in 2021 with several firearm-related offences and assaulting a peace officer.
McKenzie was later released on bail on a number of conditions which included “to remain in his residence and not to possess any firearms amongst other restrictive conditions,” added Carrique.
McKenzie failed to appear in court in response to those charges on Sept. 6, said Carrique. A warrant was then issued for his arrest and additional criminal charges were laid against McKenzie, added Carrique.

This guy, Randall McKenzie, ended up killing a police officer who thought he was on his way to help a car get out of a ditch.

Yes, we have to be fair and reasonable to criminals, especially the alleged ones who haven’t been convicted of anything. But when you’re either of these guys and have shown a blatant and repeated disregard for the system, I don’t understand why that system keeps letting you out. Gotta keep collecting those lifetime bans, I guess.

My Wages And Bargaining Rights Are Illegally Limited And I get To Work All The Extra Hours I want? Honey, Pack The Car!

Doug Ford has a very Doug Ford plan for fixing the problems with Ontario’s healthcare system.

What he’s gonna do, see, is he’s gonna loosen some rules so that workers from other provinces can come here and start working faster. He’s not gonna help them relocate or give them any kind of reason to want to do that, let’s not get crazy here. But as long as they’re not incompetent, they’ll be able to work all the extra hours they want!

Bingo, my friends! Problem solved! I’ll be at the cottage!

Premier Doug Ford is set to introduce changes that would let Canadian health-care workers registered or licensed in other provinces start immediately practicing in Ontario.
Currently, health-care professionals must be registered with one of Ontario’s health regulatory colleges before working in the province. However, in an effort to “overcome bureaucratic delays,” Ontario is prepared to loosen those rules.
The Ford government said it will introduce these legislative changes in February.
“To nurses, doctors, and health-care workers across Canada: if you’ve been thinking of making Ontario your new home, now’s the time to make that happen,” Ford said at an announcement in Windsor, Ont. on Thursday.

“With our new “As of Right” rules, Ontario is the first province in Canada to allow health-care workers from across the country to immediately start providing care,” Ford said.
The premier said the province is not offering financial incentives for health-care staff considering coming to Ontario.
Building on their effort to increase staffing levels, the government said it is also prepared to allow health-care professionals, including nurses, paramedics, respiratory therapists, and others, to work outside of their regular responsibilities or settings. “As long as they have the knowledge skill, and judgment to do so,” the release reads.

That last part is a pretty good slice of nonsense, isn’t it? I’m not sure how they want me to read it, but the way I do read it is if you’re not a reckless buffoon, feel free to work yourself to the point of burnout as often as you’d like. It’s either that or as long as you can clear the very vague buffoonery bar we’re pretending to set, we can assign you to do things you’re not trained to do after your regular shift is over. Whatever it is, it’s open to any interpretation you can come up with, because the government didn’t bother explaining what the hell it means.

What we have here, basically, is pretty much what we always have. Ford sayin’ stuff and doin’ stuff, but not pausin’ to do a whole lot of thinkin’ about the stuff. I would almost be willing to let this one go at that because it’s a policy that only matters if anyone takes him up on it, but when it comes right on the heels of some pretty fundamental changes to the way we all get treatment, I can’t really do that.

The first step would be to invest in “new partnerships with community surgical and diagnostic centres” to reduce the waitlist for cataract surgeries, ensuring 14,000 more surgeries will be performed each year. These centres include both not-for-profit and for-profit clinics.
The government will also invest more than $18 million in existing centres to cover other procedural care such as MRI and CT scans, ophthalmic surgeries, minimally invasive gynecological surgeries and plastic surgeries.
The second step involves a further expansion of “non-urgent, low-risk and minimally invasive” procedures. Little detail has been provided regarding what additional procedures will be included.
The province will also be introducing legislation next month that will, if passed, allow these private clinics to conduct more MRI and CT scanning “so that people can access publicly funded diagnostic services faster and closer.”
As part of the third and final step of the province’s plan, private clinics will be allowed to conduct hip and knee replacement surgeries as early as 2024.

On the surface, this isn’t all bad. If I need a surgery or an MRI or whatever, I don’t care who does it. As long as that person is qualified and I don’t have to pay for it, great. And if it’s going to be done sooner and closer to where I live, that’s also great. But that’s the surface. There’s a lot that needs to go on beyond that point to make it all work in a way that won’t do more harm than good, and as usual, there is nothing in the way of clarity about how that’s all supposed to happen. Where are all of these staff going to come from? What are the rules about how private clinics can market additional services to people coming in for publicly funded procedures? How are we disincentivizing doctors from taking kickbacks from private clinics for prescribing more expensive tests or surgeries that patients don’t need? Are the rates these clinics are allowed to bill OHIP the same as they are in the public system or are we going to have to negotiate separate, secret deals with them so that it’s worth their time to bother with regular, non-wealthy people who don’t pay them directly? How are we preventing those wealthy people from jumping their way to the front of the treatment line?

Ford isn’t going to answer all of these questions until he has to, of course. Assuming they even have answers (I give it 60-40 odds that they don’t), we’re not going to get them until it’s right around too late. Any sooner than that and we’ll be in for another round of “oops, sorry, none of you like that. We’re changing it, don’t worry. This very slightly less crappy thing is what we had planned all along.” Although that, embarrassing as it is, is probably what we should be hoping for with this government at this point. Being able to have some limited say in our futures Is better than bumbling blindly into whatever the alternative might be.

Cappy Meal

I’ve got no good way to start this off, so let’s just go ahead and enjoy some wholesome family time.

Police said the incident began at approximately 1:30 p.m. local time, when a man received the wrong order at a McDonald’s drive-thru in Midvale. He then “brandished a firearm” at employees, police said, and employees asked him to drive to the front of the store while they fixed the order. 
Employees then called the police. When officers responded, they issued “several verbal commands” for the man to exit the car, but he refused, police said. 
Officers then pulled him from the car and began to take him into custody. But as they were doing so, police said, “an officer turned back toward the vehicle and saw a gun pointing out from the rear window.” 
The officer was able to swipe the gun to the side as a round was fired, police said.

The round in question was fired by what turned out to be a four-year-old child who, police say, was told by his dad to shoot. Dad, in case it isn’t clear, was the one being taken into custody at the time. And just to make things a little bit worse, there was also a three-year-old in the car. At least that kid doesn’t appear to have had a gun of his own, But they’re selling JR-15s now, so give it time.

Thankfully neither child was physically harmed.

The police take a lot of flack, a not insignificant bit of it deserved, for the way they tend to kill people who don’t need killing. But it looks like they got it right this time, thank goodness. This could have easily ended very, very badly.