Gill told me about this, and on a surface level, I laugh, but I can’t imagine why I personally would ever want to go into one of these places. In Australia, there is a chain of restaurants called Karens Diner. Here is a brief description about them.
We hate good service. rated 1* by us.
THIS WILL BE THE MOST FUN YOU’VE HAD EATING BURGERS, EVER.
About Karens
Karens is an interactive diner and an absurdly fun experience. At Karens you will be greeted and waited upon by rude waiters and forced to play a variety of games.
You can expect good food, good fun and a dining experience like you’ve never had before. Let us know if it’s your birthday, if your name is Karen and for the love of Karen don’t ask to speak to the manager….
P.S if your name is actually Karen we will give you a free drink – bring some ID.
100% RUDE STAFF
Our staff are rude and our manners are non-existent. Come on, ask for the manager… WE DARE YOU.
I only have to go over to the store, or go to a restaurant, or go to the airport, or get on a bus, or do anything to take a chance that the service will be bad and people will be rude. Don’t get me wrong, I get lots of excellent service, and thank god for that. But when you’re blind, or have any sort of disability, this is the risk that comes with walking outside.
For example, I went to Walmart yesterday to pick up something. I wanted to pick up one item. This was my experience.
Because one wall of checkout tills have been turned into self-checkouts, I had to wander in there and get the attention of the self-checkout monitor.
She called someone to help me.
She called someone again after a few minutes because nobody answered her first call.
Someone finally came over, and argued with the person about what on earth they were going to do with me, because they didn’t have time for that.
The other one told her to take me to a sales associate and drop me off.
I finally got mad and said “Is it too much to ask to help me find one jug of distilled water?”
When she heard I only wanted one item, she agreed to help.
As we headed off, she asked me what I was doing there, where were my parents, and why would I need distilled water?
Another time, we were at a bar in London, and asked the server what kind of wing sauces there were, and she barked “Lots!” and left.
These situations come easily to mind. This is because there are many of them to choose from.
Why on earth would I willingly subject myself to rude people and bad service? I get that stuff for free often enough everywhere I go, and more frequently now, because everybody’s so short-staffed and short-circuited by the pandemic. I know the experience at this diner is all a joke, but I’m fully expecting them to be rude when I ask for help with the menu. If I did go there, they had better have a perfectly accessible menu, and a point of sale terminal that talks, because if they tried to be funny rude to me when I was trying to pay…they just might see Carin turn into Karen. Hopefully they wouldn’t, but the thing is that more and more, I hope that I will have good service, but I’m on my guard for the bad stuff. So if I knew I was going in somewhere where the service would be bad, I imagine it would not be a fun day.
I am curious though. Would they accept my spelling of the name as good enough to get a free drink?
About a week and a half ago, I got my fourth COVID shot. Since we got actual COVID back in June, I figured I was probably about due. Man, is it ever hard to get a straight answer on when you should get your next shot if you’ve had COVID. Wait 6 months, but don’t wait that long, but 3 is too short, but no it isn’t. You know it’s bad when you ask the pharmacist and she just googles it and reads the page from the CDC. But I figured five months would be a good compromise, it would allow it to kick in a bit before pre-Christmas and Christmas craziness, plus I wanted to get my flu shot at the same time. That way, if they ever decide it’s an annual thing, I can remember when I need them both again.
I called the drug store that gave me my last COVID booster, assuming that they would have these ones. Nope, darn it all, they didn’t have it. So I asked if they had flu shots and they did, so I asked them if they could book me an appointment and they did.
Next, I called Shoppers to see what they had. Of course, the automated thinggy told me to consult their website. Does anybody have any tips on navigating the Shoppers Drug Mart vaccination booking page? It’s a right royal pain in the hoop. It takes longer to figure out where you should go and try and book than it does to walk down there and get the damn shot! If I hear the words “map marker” one more time…
So I called back and asked if they could just book it in for me because their website was giving me trouble. The person who answered did not want to do it at all. She said “Just close the browser and try again.” I then had to break down and say “I’m blind, so I don’t think closing the browser is going to help.” Then she said “Well…just come in and try and get it as a walk-in. I was planning to take the day off the day Tansy switched homes, so I decided what the heck, I should go and get my shots too.
I thought about cancelling my appointment at the other place and just doing both of them at Shoppers, but I just figured that was tempting fate. With my luck, they would only do one by walk-in, or they wouldn’t have the other one, or something dumb. I should have tempted fate.
So, because of stupid booking systems, I had to go to two different stores to get both my shots. It’s a good thing they’re close, but still.
I was kicking myself, though, because someone else walked in while I was chilling out for those few minutes after getting the shot and just asked if they could get both shots at the same time, and they said they could. Arg. I should have made things easier on myself.
As usual, it went fine. Steve jokes that they’re not vaccinating me for real and I’m just one of those schmucks that keeps getting saline, because I’m not having all the misery that he goes through. I don’t know why. You’d think it would flatten me. The only thing that sucked was because I got two shots, I got one in each arm, so both arms were sore, so sleeping kind of sucked. I had hoped that getting the flu shot in the right arm would make it hurt less because my COVID shot sites always got really mad. But noooo! My flu shot spot was the one that was super sore. Craaap!
Even weirder, I suddenly noticed a lump under my left arm. It’s a good thing I know about lymph nodes, otherwise I might have been panicking. But Mr. Lump went away, and I really didn’t have any other nasty surprises.
So I’ve had my flu shot and my COVID shot. Hopefully I’m good for a while.
Hello there, 53-year-old Florida woman. I just wanted to take a few seconds out of my day to tell you that in spite of how things may seem sometimes, things really are going to be ok.
For starters, you absolutely appear to have been on the right side of that argument you had with your buddy James about eating food at Burger King. No is pretty much always the correct answer, so good on you.
But if you truly want to get things moving on the right track, you might want to rethink hanging around ‘ol Jimbo altogether. He seems like trouble.
According to a criminal complaint, James Hunt, 41, and his “girlfriend and cohabitant” argued Saturday afternoon about “the victim not eating her food” at a Burger King in Clearwater, a city in the Tampa Bay area.
The dispute turned violent, cops say, when the 53-year-old woman began to leave the restaurant. That is when Hunt allegedly “threw a cheeseburger at the victim, striking her in the back of the head. This action caused the victim to fall over a curb onto the ground.”
The victim’s chin and lip hit the pavement, resulting in an abrasion and a cut. Upon arriving at the Burger King, cops observed blood on the victim’s shirt and shorts and cheese on her shirt and in her hair.
I’ll give Jimmy this much, at least. If he really did knock her down with that burger (he told the police he didn’t think he did), boy’s got a cannon for an arm. If jail has a baseball team, maybe that’ll give him something productive to do.
Gill sent this yesterday, but I ran out of time to post it so I’m posting it now. We had a conversation about this, and I told her to try not to beat herself up so much because as kids, we all do things that seem like a good idea at the time, but aren’t very smart. That’s why we have the time to make those mistakes safely so we can learn from them. I think if I could have joined in, I might have told her 14-year-old self that if we don’t take time to remember these things, we’ll start taking them for granted on a large scale. I know that we still have wars, so it’s not like our job is done because we have these ceremonies, but I think it’s important to keep the message alive that wars are a tragic loss of life. Also, veterans don’t live forever and shouldn’t be expected to do all the reminding.
When we are teenagers we play stupid games unaware of the stupid prizes. When I was 14 I thought in my misguided mind that boycotting the Remembrance Day ceremony at my school would be a great idea. I thought that it was a direct violation of the pacifism I proclaimed. When I went to voice these ideas to fellow classmates they just would tell me how ungrateful I was before walking away and calling me retarded.
What I believed At The Time
I thought by attending the ceremony that I was endorsing war and the violence that came along with it.
What I would Tell and Do To 14-year-old Me
I would sit her down, pour her tea or hot chocolate, and angrily tell her to give her head a shake. Once I’d calmed down to reasonable I would tell her about the fact that her relatives served, and what would they think of her trashing their memory. I would also tell her that if they hadn’t fought for what was right, she may not be here, or we’d all be writing these things in German.
I must be weird, because I never got the feeling that Remembrance Day ceremonies were glorifying war. They were sad and sombre. We listed off a bunch of names of people who never made it home, and talked about a bunch more who did make it home, but were never the same again. But she’s not the only one who got the glorifying message. the white poppy crowd tend to agree. I wonder how it could be made more clear that this is not a celebration.
What? Huh? Why your favorite shows and films sound worse than ever
I’m not one who watches a ton of modern movies or TV shows, but even I have most definitely noticed this. And it’s not just because the television in our house is old as the hills. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m listening on. The sound really does seem to be getting worse.
There are a variety of reasons for this. Everything from the way things are shot and mic’d to the rise of streaming and every company having its own mixing specifications to just the plain simple fact that there are so many different devices now. Even if you manage to nail the perfect mix in the studio, there’s no telling how it’s going to sound once the networks get hold of it and start compressing it in order to get around the loudness rules for commercials, not to mention when you watch it wherever you watch it.
A lot of people have apparently started trying to get around this by simply turning on the subtitles and essentially reading all their shows. Not a great solution, but you do what you have to do, I suppose. But let’s say you can’t do that. There are people, the two in our house among them, for whom subtitles simply aren’t an option. The lack of usable vision rules that right out. No one has thought about this, of course. And to the extent that they unintentionally have, it basically boils down to buy more crap.
There are some things that we can do. For instance, there’s always buying a nice sound system. Even more important is setting it up properly. Most of the sound mixers interviewed recommended having professional help but also mentioned that many soundbars today come with microphones for home optimization. None sounded too convinced by soundbars, though.
“If you’re using a soundbar,” Bondelevitch said, “Get the best soundbar you can afford. And if you’re listening on your earbuds or headphones, get good headphones. If it’s a noisy environment, get over-the-ear headphones. They do really isolate sound much better and do not use noise canceling headphones because those really screw up the audio quality.”
But more than anything, they emphasized how this is a selling factor for movie theaters. If you want good sound, there’s a place that has “sound you can feel.”
“It’s a bummer because you want the theater experience,” said Vanchure. “People aren’t going out to theaters as much nowadays because everything’s just streaming. And that’s how you want people to hear these things. You’re doing this work so you can hear this loud and big.”
I realize that nobody with final say particularly cares, but a lot of blind people quite enjoy television, actually. Alienating them might seem like a small price to pay when you don’t think long-term or big picture because business is all about wringing the most money out of everything in the least amount of time quality be damned, but better sound is about more than just us. Like so much when it comes to accessibility, the things that are good for the disabled often wind up being good for everyone. If dialogue is something so easily sacrificed, why don’t we just go back to making silent films?
I think it’s time to immortalize the last few months of sleep chatter because this may be the last sleep chatter we can catch! I’m going to write a whole post about this, but on Monday, I will finally be getting my CPAP machine. This will mean two things: better sleep, which might result in less talking, and if I do talk in my sleep, it will likely be indecipherable because of the mask. So we need to get these confusing utterances up here so we can all have one last good laugh at me.
But before we start laughing at me, I have to take a second to laugh at Steve. At least once, he has fallen asleep with the TV on, and been convinced he heard something he didn’t, like the time I thought the announcer said “there’s a big pile of dead babies out there.” One time, we were watching TV, and a commercial for Always overnight pads came on. Steve started chuckling and said “I’ve never heard that one before.” I said “I’m pretty sure that commercial’s been around for a while.” and he said “Really? The one that tells you you can use the soap for up to 10 hours, or to monitor the invisible man?” Bewildered, I said “Um no. It said the pads were good for up to 10 hours of protection no matter how you sleep. ‘So be a flamingo or a gecko…’ and all that stuff.” He said “Oh. That’s not what I heard. I must have been dreaming.” So I’m not the only one whose mind butchers actual things I hear while I sleep. But with that out of the way, let the laughing at me begin!
Those damn train whistles are back. This is not normally a cause for celebration, but last night they indirectly kicked off this new thread, so I’ll thank them for that since I am nothing if not a fair man.
They scared the hell out of me, of course. But as I’m internally cursing them out for potentially ruining a night of sleep before it had much of a chance to truly get started, I suddenly hear mumble singing from the other side of the bed.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand the croooooooooooooooow gooooooooooooooooos caw…I guess it was alive…”
“Mounted Animal Nature Trail,” I asked?
“Well, you know, it’s just like we said earlier.”
“What about?”
“Well…you know…it was the something…well I can’t find the words.”
At first I thought she said something about finding someone in the woods, but I’m pretty certain it was words.
Neither of us has any idea what might have sparked the sleepy, droopy singalong. I thought maybe the train was taking us to the nature trail, but Carin isn’t sure. She’s too busy cackling at herself.
If I could even make sense out of that, I’m going to have to hope that I heard the train in my subconscious, thought about Gill who was going to the Arrogant Worms concert the next day and took part of the trip by train, wondered what song she was going to yell for the Worms to play, thought about how many times they do the “Mounted Animal Nature Trail” song at concerts, and sleep brain decided to break into song. But that’s a new one…singing in my sleep. And again, I had this whole idea of why randomly singing that song made perfect sense…until it popped like a bubblegum bubble.
I awoke early this morning to Carin plotting some repair work.
“Hmmmm. I wonder if I can pull this off without causing any trouble.”
Sensing her starting to move, I thought I had better ask a question.
“What are you trying to do?”
“Well, I was going to see if I could fix the ahhhh I don’t have any of the words for it.”
And just like that, she was out like a light again.
I have 0 memory of this. Not a speck. Gees! I’m glad he caught me before I managed to get up. Who knows what I would have tried to pull off?
Carin’s been doing quite a bit of sleep chattering since she’s been back from her trip to the States. Unfortunately I haven’t been awake enough to catch most of it, but here are a couple I did manage to pick out.
1. “My bloop is off and running! Ha ha!”
I have no idea what a bloop is or where it’s going.
2. “I held your stuff in balance all the way from Egypt. That way if anything did screw up it would all be ok.”
Whose stuff? NO clue. Egypt? NO idea.
Once again, I haven’t a clue either. I wonder if my bloop is scoozy, like my eyebrows in that other chatter fest. We never found out what they did to the grey iPod either! I do remember once waking up in the middle of a TV commercial convinced the giant braille display we had borrowed for the conference was having a meltdown and started going on and on about how I had to fix it right now.
This was less of a chattering, and more of me doing something dumb in my sleep. One saturday night, I woke up and my watch was gone. “Strange,” I thought, “it was on my wrist when I went to sleep because I had to fix the time before I went to bed.” I looked on the little dresser thing beside the bed. I looked on the other night table thing. I looked on my desk. Nope. It was on the floor, somehow hiding under a pair of pants! Eek! I think I did that in my sleep!
I awoke in the middle of the night because I could hear Carin talking to…someone.
“So do you have to convince people about a lot of crazy stuff? How hard is that?”
I asked what kind of stuff, but as usual she couldn’t tell me.
And I am still devoid of clue.
No idea what Carin was dreaming about, but a couple nights ago I woke up to the words “Uh-huh. I guess we had better get this all set up for your head.” She was snoring again before I had a chance to ask any questions.
Brain scans maybe?
I think part of me wonders if I’ll be able to avoid the MRI this year. It looks like I’ll be ok. I did have a weird dream about a weird and wacky ct scan that I was going through…maybe that was it?
Last night I awoke to Carin moving around on the bed and babbling on and on about her dad and a “fuzzy elephant.”
“What’s this about a fuzzy elephant,” I asked?
“No no,” she corrected me nonchalantly. “It’s a fuzzy elevator.”
I was unable to get any clarification as she immediately returned to full sleep.
I did have a rather vivid dream about getting lost on a cruise ship, and Mom and Dad went on a cruise a few months ago and mom and I were talking about it. Maybe dad was on a fuzzy elevator? I don’t know.
Last night I was dreaming that I was chasing a baby with a very large head around a conference room full of politicians when suddenly, Carin’s voice came through the real and dream wall.
“Yes, it should have plenty of friction. Of course. And reading and writing. There should also be talking like the several other ones had.”
Unfortunately I didn’t ask any followup questions, but it almost sounded like she was helping write a story.
Man, I wish I knew what kind of story I was building. I lead such an interesting life in my sleep.
And that’s all we got this time. What a sad little collection. Let’s see what the future brings.
I have to admit that this year, my poppy has stayed on. Admittedly I haven’t been out as much, but still. It has managed to fall off in the closet before! Maybe our ghost hates poppies too? Or maybe he’s a soldier and he wants to make sure we make another donation, so steals our poppies.
Thankfully, this year I had an easier time finding a place to get our poppies, and unless the ghost steals them today, they will have stayed on the whole time! Yea long pin…that didn’t impale me in the process.
I can’t be the only one who finds it a little bit creepy and distasteful when I open my email on a day like Remembrance Day to find businesses marketing whatever it is they sell alongside lest we forget messages. I’m not the easily offended type, but I find it gross. Do what you want with Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving, but can you please leave Remembrance Day out of it?
Yes, I know there are those who don’t like all the marketing around those other holidays either, but face it, it’s here and it’s not going away. Those holidays, for better or worse, have been de-serioused.
Christmas, for example, has gone from child is conceived under some very suspicious circumstances, is born amongst animals and becomes the lord and saviour of all mankind so let us celebrate his birthday to fat guy enslaves midgets, exploits animals, breaks into houses worldwide and leaves forced labour presents for everyone so let us all get drunk and eat turkey.
Easter, too. Somehow it went from child from Christmas grows up, gets murdered, comes back from the dead and then disappears but is always watching over us to bunny breaks into houses worldwide and hides chocolate eggs under all your furniture.
You can participate in these less serious versions to whatever degree you choose, but in a broader sense, there’s no coming back from that.
But Remembrance Day is and should always be untouched.
Unless…
If the brands just can’t help themselves and must sell us things on a day during which we’re supposed to be reflecting on those who have died from or been permanently scarred by the horrors of war, allow me to offer an assist.
My photoshop skills do not exist, so you’ll have to do that part on your own. But what I do have is a concept.
How about a mischievous childlike elf dressed all in camouflage. We’ll call him the Amp Scamp. Every November 10th or Remembrance Day Eve if you prefer, he will overcome his physical challenges in order to break into houses worldwide because we’ve got to stick to the theme, and leave delicious treats like Big Foot, Butterfinger, Jawbreakers, Bugles, Warheads or anything else with a body part, war or weapon sounding name for the good girls and boys.
If that sounds like an awful idea to you, you are correct. But so is heavy-handedly trying to sell me chocolate today, so you started it.
Gill has an interesting thought at the end here. So often we hear stories about family we’ve never met and never will. They’re almost always held up as salt of the earth human beings, maybe even heroes. But what kind of people were they, really? It sometimes feels like you’re not supposed to ask or even think about it. Ditto for a lot of what gets taught in history classes. So much gets left out either because it prevents us from having to confront our own failings or because it’s far too complicated and some questions just can never be answered.
At the dawn of the 20th century race relations were tenuous at best, and movements such as the Great Migration in the United States saw many people of color from the rural and segregated south move to larger cities in the north for opportunities. But what was World War 1 like?
Harding’s War
The Harding I am referring to is my great-great-uncle {1886-1920} who served in France in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 73rd division if you would like to look at the book of Remembrance. He left my great-great-aunt Selmo Mitchell-Walter with a babe in arms daughter Isla, but came back different.
Canada’s Jim Crow
When people think Jim Crow Segregation, they often think of Tennessee or Alabama with signs saying “Whites Only” or water fountains for “Coloreds”, but those aren’t the only places that used prejudices to segregate. The Canadian Army was also segregated. There was an all black division, but instead of being handed rifles and heroes welcomes like my great-great-uncle they were forced to do menial tasks and told to dig the trenches my great-great-uncle and his men were in.
This Leaves Me Curious
If Harding had seen one of his brothers in arms, would he have broken bread with them, or would he have held the prejudices of the era? I’ll never know as he died in 1920.
Ford and company, as usual, have made a right mess of things. Also as usual, their tough talk has gotten them where it gets them more often than any government with any sort of clue should ever be ending up. Time to Put on the flip flops and start walking backwards.
Premier Doug Ford says he is willing to repeal his controversial bill overriding Charter rights and return to the bargaining table if CUPE calls off the strike by school support staff.
In an olive branch meant to turn down the heat as workers remain off the job for a second day — shutting down schools in many boards, and amid talk of a general strike one day next week — Ford and Education Minister Stephen Lecce made the announcement Monday morning as hundreds of education workers protested out front of Queen’s Park.
Ford said the government “as a gesture of good faith” is willing to repeal Bill 28 “but only if CUPE agrees to show a similar gesture of good faith by stopping their strike and letting our kids back into their classrooms.”
Students, he added, “don’t deserve to be caught in the middle of these negotiations … for the sake of the students, CUPE please accept this offer. Take strike action off the table and let our kids back in class.”
If I’m CUPE, I say sure, but on one condition. You go first. Repeal the bill and then we’ll get back to work and back to talking. When you’re dealing with a government as disrespectful and dishonest as this one, I’m not sure you can trust it to keep its word and I’m not up for finding out that I’m right again. So for me, this seems like the only way forward. If Ford is truly serious, he should have no problem with that. Then again what I just described is pretty much how negotiating works, and that entire concept is just a bit of a problem area for them these days.
I hope we don’t come to the point of needing a general provincial strike, but if that’s what happens, I absolutely support it. Ford needs to be reminded yet again that he’s not a dictator who can just do whatever he wants up to and including stripping people of their constitutional rights. If that means shutting the whole place down for a few days, then so be it.
And for god’s sake, can we all please learn the lesson we should have learned in 2022 in 2026? Please? I’ll beg if I have to. In the meantime, I do hope that the unions who openly supported Ford last election have learned theirs. It was foolish when you did it and it looks even worse now.