Vomit Comet

Hey! Newsflash! It’s the World Wide Web!

Here’s a rant for people who build an online shop, and then forget what that www at the beginning is all about. Let me just describe five incidents I have had where I have wanted to buy something for someone in another country, and I couldn’t do it, because I didn’t live in that country. These five incidents come readily to mind. I’m sure there are more.

I wanted to buy some C’s Candies for someone who was in guide dog class in the states. Everything was just going tickity boo…until it wasn’t. It asked for my zip code, and the form would not take letters. It would not! I had to phone a toll free number and negotiate with someone to get them to enter my stuff manually!

I am well aware that C’s Candies doesn’t ship outside the U.S. But that doesn’t mean people in other countries don’t have American friends and don’t want to give C’s Candies their money. This is a global market, and no, The US is not the centre of it.

The next three incidents stemmed from the same situation. I was in a secret Santa gift exchange. Whenever I have been in a secret Santa exchange that had members in Canada and the states, I always said I was willing to pair up with people from either country. But after this shit show, I might change my mind, even though that would narrow the pool drastically.

The person said that she liked gift cards from the Old Spaghetti Factory, iTunes, or somewhere called Batch & Brine. So I thought I would get her something from the Old Spaghetti Factory. I thought it would be fun! I also thought it would be easier because we have Old Spaghetti Factories up here.
Nope! Postal codes were not possible, and even if you want to send it to someone in the US, you need to enter your billing address to order anything. When I reached out to them by email, they flatly said no.

So I tried the Batch & Brine place. They valiantly tried to help me, but their system just wasn’t built for it.

Then I tried iTunes, ya know, the giant seller of apple products? Nope. You can only buy iTunes cards for people in your own country. This is harder than you would think to find out, and even when I called Apple directly, I got the biggest runaround imaginable, and the people answering my call didn’t even know!

I got her an Amazon gift card, but I had to remember to not use Amazon.ca, because if I had, she couldn’t have used it on amazon.com! Like seriously, Apple and Amazon, I’m sure you could manage currency conversion.

In another secret Santa exchange, the person said she liked pizza, so I was looking for a gift card for a local pizza place in her town. But I ran into another example of only zip codes allowed. I had to keep calling for days until someone could help me out. They are lucky I’m determined. I never heard from the secret Santa person if that pizza was any good. I sure hope it was at least decent.

You would think after COVID, when people were shipping all sorts of parcels, that stores would realize the whole international space. But nope, this is not the case. In fact, it almost feels like it’s gotten worse. But maybe I just never had to try and buy from so many American retailers.

Miltons To Cease Beating Up Disabled Patrons

I wrote about the service dog denial situation at Miltons restaurant not long after it happened, but hadn’t talked about it since.

Boy oh boy, a lot sure has happened since.

Charges were filed and later withdrawn, settlements were reached, apologies and donations were made. And now, for reasons that the owners won’t comment on but that you’re going to have a hard time convincing me weren’t at least in part due to their awful behaviour getting out, the place has closed down.

In a way I feel bad for them. Everyone deserves a second chance, assuming this was their first one, of course. But on the other hand, you can only curse out and rough up so many defenseless customers before it starts leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths. We don’t live in a fair world, but sometimes people do get what they deserve. As much as I enjoy a bad guy makes good story, I have trouble shaking the feeling that we’re landing anywhere but on the people getting theirs end of the spectrum here. What we saw in that video went on too long and too loud for it to have been a momentary lapse in judgement.

Miltons Restaurant has closed but remains for sale at a reduced price, after two brothers who operated it sparked outrage by forcefully removing a customer and his service dog in 2021.
The incident, captured on video, led to a boycott and a torrent of bad publicity. In the days that followed, people gathered outside the restaurant with signs, urging people not to support the business.
A police investigation led to assault charges against both men. One man, named in a business document as the person who registered Miltons, was further charged with uttering threats.
Last October, all parties including the customer agreed to the withdrawal of charges after the victim did not want to testify. The two men each made a $1,500 donation to a charity for the blind, and wrote a personal letter of apology to the customer.

John Q. Public’s Intro To Guide Dogs

This article about getting a guide dog does a pretty good job of describing the complexities in the matching process, the relationship between the dog and the handler, and lots of other stuff that people often ask us. And the best part is it’s written by someone I know! Shermeen is graduating with her new guide dog today. I hope people enjoy this article, and show it to others who might be interested. And I hope Shermeen’s graduation and trip home go smoothly.

I Think You Should Name Him Cash, As In Hand Over A Bunch Of Your

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that naming a baby is easy. Whatever you settle on, you, and more importantly the kid, are wearing it forever. Clearly, it’s a choice that you’re going to want to get right. And yeah, sometimes it’s nice to have a little help. But if you ever find yourself getting to the point where paying some lady who has never had to name a child of her own up to $10,000 to suggest names for yours seems like a thing you should actually go ahead and do, I say with every ounce of sincerity I possess that perhaps you may not be prepared to face down the many challenges that parenting is going to present you. To be fair, I say this as someone who also doesn’t have any children of his own. But it does come from an oldest child who’s been through some things, so there’s that. I’ll let you decide what it’s worth.

Taylor A. Humphrey, 33, helped name more than 100 babies in 2020, raking in more than $150,000 from cashed-up couples.
Some panicked parents are even turning over an eye-popping $10,000 so that Humphrey can help them settle on an impeccable name for their offspring.

The New York businesswoman — who does not have any children — bills herself as a “passionate writer and storyteller” who is “adept at branding, marketing and social media.”

Depending on how much expectant parents pay, Humphrey’s services “range from a phone call and a bespoke name list to a genealogical investigation” with the aim of unearthing old family names, as reported by The New Yorker.

Recently, the innovative entrepreneur chose the baby name Parks for a couple who had their first kiss in a town called Parker.

In a recent video, Humphrey advised a mom who was expecting baby No. 3 and needed a name to flow with those of her two older sons, Emmet and Miller.
Humphrey’s top picks: Grady, Wilson, Waylon and Fletcher.

Her website is here if you feel you need it or if, like me, you’re tempted to spring for a list just to see what she might come up with for your own hypothetical kid.

There’s also a “What should I name my baby?” quiz you can try. Most of the decent names in my highest scoring categories are things I likely would have come up with on my own or names that other people in my close family are already using, but it’s a general quiz, so your mileage may vary. But please, tell me that nobody out there is naming their little girl Buttercup. Buttercup is a cow.

Dear Google:

I don’t care how many times you ask me (it’s been three today alone), I am not turning on the fucking vignette ads. No, not even if you predict that my revenue will go up by 20% were I to do so. There is also no need for you to explain to me what they are. I know what they are. They’re annoying as shit and my decision to turn them off was a deliberate one. A deliberate one made by a man who does not enjoy being infuriated by the user experience of his own blog for reasons that are within his control.

Quite obviously, I do not mind ads on a website. The bills aren’t going to pay themselves. But what I do mind are ads that interrupt me while I am performing a basic task and in which I subsequently become trapped with no reliable means of escape. As a screen reader user, that is exactly what vignette ads are. I’m sure that most folks, as you say, can skip them at any time. I am not most folks. What happens to me is almost always some combination of the following:

My page load gets interrupted.
my arrows and navigation keys stop working, leaving me unable to properly navigate the window.
Sometimes I can tab once or twice and things will come into focus, but not always.
Sometimes I can shift tab once or twice and things will come into focus, but not always.
Sometimes I can tab and then shift tab and things will come into focus, but not always.
Sometimes I can shift tab and then tab and things will come into focus, but not always.
Sometimes I can hit escape, the ad will disappear and I’ll be back on the page I started on and will have to click the one I wanted again, but this is rare.
Even when I madly start mashing buttons until one of the above methods for regaining control works, half the time I still can’t find the close button on the damn ad until I madly hit a few more keys.
Sometimes, even after all of that, there is no close button.
In that case, I have to refresh, end up back where I started, then click once more on the page I wanted to visit in the first place before I got caught in the vignette and hope to god I don’t get caught again.
Thankfully I generally don’t, because the one good feature of vignette ads is that only so many of them are served to the same user in a given day.

There aren’t nearly as many steps to this dance on mobile, but vignettes are no picnic there, either. The worst thing that happens to you in that case is wasting a few frustrating seconds figuring out whether or not there is a close button and then just doing the refresh thing if there isn’t.

With all of this in mind, I decided several months ago that the number of vignette ads that will be served to my users on any given day will be zero. And it’s a funny thing. Once I turned them off, my revenue actually went up. Funny not only because it sure is odd that not making people hate your face on the regular might actually work as a strategy, but also because I’m not sure how all of the screen reader users who visit the place weren’t constantly clicking on the damn things by accident.

I’m glad we were able to have this talk. Hopefully it has helped you understand my position on this matter more clearly than before. And hey, if you ever figure out how to make vignettes less awful for guys like me, let me know.

She’s Some Kinda What Now?

I just finished listening to the Storm game. They beat Owen Sound 6-2, for the record. Woo! But that’s not important at the moment. What’s important is what happened when CJOY went back to playing music after the postgame.

It wasn’t half bad, so I left it on. Then, I assume because it decided that it was only half bad and could totally be more bad, it played Some Kinda Wonderful by Sky. If you don’t remember that song, good for you. And I’m sorry for what I’m about to do.

So it’s playing away, and I’m thinking that I really need to turn it off and find something else to listen to. And then, out of the corner of my ear, I hear something.

“She’s some kinda wonderful. You got a snowflake, she’s an asshole.”

Hang on. That’s not right. I know it’s not right. I don’t remember what is right because I haven’t heard that song in eons and I try not to think about it, but I know what I want to be right. I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not looking it up, because I don’t want to ruin my foolishness for myself. It entertains me so.

But Carin, helpful killjoy that she is, just had to know.

Turns out that the real line is “She’s some kinda wonderful, Forget it snowflake she is mine, So…”

Meh. I know what it is forever in my heart.

Do I Have Your Attention Now?

Not quite as eventful as the one from the other day, but still worth a post because reading it has made me realize that I’m going to feel a little bad every time I travel now. Not because I touch myself and other people on planes and am starting to figure out that perhaps I shouldn’t, but because if some poor woman ever tries to get my attention this way, it’s not gonna work and she’s going to think I’m ignoring her. If she’s got Voiceover turned on good and loud we’ll be fine, but at that point she might as well just scream.

Shortly after taking off, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said, the victim, a 21-year-old woman who was seated next to Robinson during the flight, recorded a 24-second video of Robinson allegedly fondling and manipulating his penis through his pants.

A short time later, the victim alleges, she looked over and saw that Robinson had exposed his penis.

Approximately five minutes before landing, Robinson allegedly put his hand on the victim’s thigh. The victim then asked why he was touching her, and he withdrew his hand.
The victim got the attention of another passenger by showing a message on her phone that read: “Hi, this man assaulted me and touched my leg and is masturbating.”

Rogers Goes Back To Half Assing Blue Jays Radio

Sportsnet’s Blue Jays radio broadcasters will call road games remotely from Toronto
There’s still time for you to change your mind on this, Rogers. Please do that. And let’s get Bowen and Ralph traveling with the Leafs again while we’re at it.

Sports coverage, like a lot of coverage, loses something when it’s not done from where the event is happening. It doesn’t matter how good your reporters and announcers are. It just does. It’s less natural and not nearly as thorough, and it winds up coming through in the product. Jerry Howarth explains it pretty well.

Howarth, who called home and away games over three-plus decades in the Blue Jays’ radio booth, said it’s simply “essential” to be on site when a team is on the road.
“You’re at the batting cage and you’re visiting with players. You’re getting a glimpse of what happened the day before and what might happen in this game,” Howarth said in a recent interview from Toronto. “Then you go to the umpires’ quarters and have a visit with them or maybe (discuss) a call that happened the day before.
“You’re always gathering information and stories and things that you share with people on the radio.”

Howarth said in-person coverage allows broadcasters to become “fully absorbed” in what’s happening at the stadium.
“This is where the audience, when they don’t get this, in my mind they get cheated as far as the full enjoyment of a baseball season that takes 162 games to play,” he said.
“Give the audience every aspect of the game, not just half of it or just what’s at home.”

By the way, if Rob Manfred is telling the truth for once in his life, what is he even doing here?

The subject was raised during Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred’s media availability at the Blue Jays’ complex late Thursday afternoon.
“Honestly I listen to baseball on the radio a fair amount actually,” Manfred said. “I can’t tell you that I really have discerned a significant difference in part because I’m not sure which clubs are doing what.
“So I’m just not qualified to give you a good answer on that one.”

Not to toot my own horn or whatever, but I never saw any announcement about Ben Wagner going back on the road part way through last season. It just hit me one day that the presentation sounded different. That made me go look it up and oh hey, I’m right. Not saying I couldn’t be fooled for a while especially by teams I don’t listen to all the time, but I also don’t run Major League Baseball.

What really gets me about this is that midseason, Rogers made a change for the better. Unless that was one of those accidents where someone forgot for a moment that they were supposed to run things cheap and shitty, why take a step backwards? If it was something that Wagner requested for health or family reasons then fine enough I guess, but if that’s the case then why isn’t Rogers letting him speak about it?

I’m still going to be happy when baseball gets here, but things like this make me look forward to it less than I should. But I suppose it could always be worse. At least we’re not stuck with TV guys who constantly forget they’re on the radio anymore.

Swat!

Today in people who don’t know what an internet or a library is: These two fellas who beat each other with a stick and a baseball bat when an argument over what mosquitos look like got out of hand.

According to an arrest warrant, officers found Shavers’ roommate standing outside with blood all over his face in the early morning hours of April 4. He told them Shavers had assaulted him.
Police found Shavers inside the home, sitting on his bed with blood on his head and hand, according to the affidavit.
It was then the victim explained to police how a discussion about what a mosquito looks like escalated into a fight. The roommate said Shavers grabbed a stick from behind his bed and started hitting him on the head with it, according to the affidavit. He said Shavers hit him at least six times, according to the affidavit.
The roommate then grabbed a metal bat from his closet and hit Shavers multiple times in the head.

It’s hard to tell who got the worst of things here. The unidentified victim required several stitches to close cuts on his head and cheek, but Victor Symone Shavers, who admitted to taking the first shot, ended up with a cut to the back of his head and a potentially broken hand, not to mention the part where he got arrested.

On second thought, maybe it’s not so hard.

But although we may know who won the battle on this night (not Mr. Shavers, for the record), we don’t know who won the argument. Who took what position and whether or not either was actually right were not reported. Also not reported was whether alcohol or other substances may have been involved in getting us to where we currently find ourselves.

We may never solve those issues, but we can darn sure go ahead and take care of one very important one right now.

Here, for future reference and to save the police another trip, is a page on the CDC website filled with pictures of mosquitos. Pictures such as this one.

That was easy.

I’ll Take Just Because All These Words Are Here Doesn’t Mean I Have To Quote Them For $200, Ken

Just a quick note to all current and future Jeopardy contestants.

If there is a category with a name that’s like 7000 words long, it is completely fine to not say each one of those 7000 words every time you ask for a clue.

Using tonight’s episode as an example, there is a category called “a decade of number one hits tells a story.” There are longer ones, but that is a long category name. But do you think that any of these people shortened that thing down to something like “hits for 200” or “number ones for six”? No, they did not. And this annoys me.

If no one has, I need somebody to compile some stats on how much time is wasted and how many clues go unplayed because of people who insist on yammering on for a hundred years every few seconds simply because they absolutely must say what’s on the board. It has to be more than zero. It has to be.

It could be worse, I suppose. One day some clown could try to rattle off the entire name of one of those “Hi, I’m Fred Wilson from Action News 7 and today I’m here at the…” categories. Although I kind of wouldn’t mind hearing somebody try to do that once. Just once, though.