Region Of Waterloo Implements Entitled Stupid Person Tax

Make speed camera signs bigger, brighter, and bolder, driver says after $88 ticket
I’ve got a better idea. What if, instead of more signage, there were less signage and you all just, like, drove properly?

In a perfect world, there would be no signs announcing speed cameras at all. The one announcing the speed limit is all you really need. The speed limit, in case you’ve forgotten, isn’t a suggestion. It’s a regulation. One which you flout at not just your own risk, but also mine. Just like any other gamble, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And if you have to lose, a ticket is a much better way of doing so than killing a bunch of people because you’re too important to slow the fuck down.

Can those cameras be a cash grab? Yes. Is that a problem? No. Not when those from whom the cash is being grabbed could have so easily prevented its grabbing. If they can’t even bother to do that, then grab away, cameras. Grab away. Grab enough and maybe we can even use all that money to pay for things like municipal snow removal so that those like me who will never have the privilege of driving our own guided missiles can at least safely navigate the sidewalks.

Dull signage is among several beefs Wang has with speed cameras in school zones.
He doesn’t like that they operate around the clock when schools are closed. He thinks tickets are too costly, and he’s frustrated by a misunderstanding about the appeal process that derailed his ticket challenge.
He’s not buying the government’s argument that cameras in school zones are about making roads safer for schoolchildren.
“I personally don’t feel like I have done anything wrong, given the circumstances,” he said.

Christ, what a whiny little bitch. But he’s a whiny little bitch who does have a bit of a gripe under our current system, assuming he’s telling the truth.

Wang is upset about his $88 ticket for driving 53 km/h past Laurentian Public School, where regional council has dropped the limit to 40 km/h from 50 as a safety measure.
A sign on Westmount Road East announces the camera. Wang says his view of it was obscured by a road construction sign that was directly in his eye line when he turned onto Westmount from a plaza.

“I never saw it,” he said. 
The Kitchener man, who owns a language school, was ticketed for an infraction in May. Last week there was still road construction near the school and camera sign.

But again, I remind you all that this whole thing could have likely been avoided if our man here had simply obeyed the sign he could see, that being the one with the speed limit on it. And honestly, even he should be on my side here, because if there were no camera sign for him to not have seen, he’d have been nabbed fair and square and have had nothing to complain about since he admits he was speeding.

Where’s The Worst Place To Hide A Herring?

I don’t know how often they do these on the show, but I’ve only seen a couple of them. I posted one, but I’m pretty sure there’s at least one more that I didn’t put up for some reason. Maybe I’ll try to find it. But until then, enjoy Seth Meyers talking to Karoline Leavitt. It’s as real as anything else she says.

Tom Lehrer Rests Eternal-L-Y

Well, darn it all. I just got the news that Tom Lehrer passed away. He was 97, so he had a pretty long life, but it’s still sad.

That’s probably the song that everyone knows him the most for, but the first one that I knew to be his was called “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”

When I found out his name, I decided to see if I could find more of his stuff…and merrily down the Tom Lehrer rabbit hole I went.

At which point, I landed on a song that I had heard Dad sing a few lines of from time to time. I just thought Dad was being weird, but I finally knew it was a real song. That was a revelation.

It took a while, but I think I found almost all of his stuff, and what a collection of stuff! There were songs about war, songs about nuclear bombs, freedom of the press…kind of, pollution, Harvard,, you name it, he probably wrote a song about it. And he wrote a bunch of them in the 50’s and 60’s and they’re still funny today.

And then he went and wrote kids’ songs! I had no idea he was in The Electric Company!

But I feel like a jerk mentioning all his music because in his later years, I heard that he really didn’t want to talk about that anymore. I don’t know if he was just sick of everybody talking about it, or if he wanted to be more known for his work in math, but that guy made a lot of good music. Lots of it was dark, but all of it was brilliant! But what else can you expect from a guy who got a math degree at 18? He says we can’t get away from mathematics, and he couldn’t get away from his music.

We’ve lost a genius today. But his music will stay with us for a long long time.

Now Boarding Flight Out Of My Mind!

Someone at Heathrow Airport has spent a little too much time at Heathrow Airport. They have stopped noticing the ambient noise that is caused by people doing what you do at an airport. You know, hearing announcements, picking up your luggage, going through security, walking from A to B. So they thought “You know what would Spruce up this place? If it had a soundtrack of baggage carousels, planes taking off, announcements, people walking around, beeps and boops from security and other airport noises, all set to music! Brilliant!” and it was done!

Does anyone else see the problem with this? Those real sounds are already in the airport. We don’t need a second layer of them. That just causes chaos to anyone who might be relying on those sounds for clues about where they are or what’s going on. I don’t want to have to think “There’s a gate announcement. Is that a real gate announcement or one of those fake ones?”

This happens to me on a smaller scale whenever I enter a store with self-checkouts. When I was younger, I could walk into a store and listen for the sound of cash registers. Cash registers were manned by humans, so I could walk towards that beeping, find a human, and ask for assistance around the store. But self-checkouts make beeps and boops just like the old registers, so I can’t target the beeping things and get help. It sucks! Now amplify that by a whole pile at the airport.

I know that usually I’m getting help around the airport, but there are some crazy good frequent flying blind folks that walk through airports independently. And even if I’m getting help, I’d like to be able to trust my ears to give me clues about what’s happening. If my gate changes, for example, I might hear that announcement before my assistant notices the change on the board. Now, I’ll have to wonder if the announcement I’ve heard is a real one or a fake one.

I know the soundtrack of airport noise is set to music, so maybe that will be no big deal if real announcements stop the music when they talk, but what if they don’t?

Airports are noisy enough as it is. We don’t need double noise. I don’t think the effect will be exciting for travellers, even the ones that can see. Some people are sensitive to sound and don’t need more of it. I think what they will have done is make the experience unnecessarily overwhelming.

If You Don’t Like The Song “Stayin’ Alive”, How About These?

Back a very very long time ago, I learned that if you ever have to do CPR and need a way to keep the compressions well-timed, you can use certain songs. At the time, the only one I had heard about was ‘stayin alive’.

Now, I have found a whole medley of good CPR songs.

I do have to giggle that “Another One Bites the Dust” is in here. I found another medley that contained “Highway to Hell” and “Baby Shark” But I think you get the idea with this one. I guess the key is that it needs to be 100-120 beats per minute, which matches the number of compressions.

Somebody created a Spotify playlist of good CPR songs, and it’s 9 hours long! Duuuude! I hope nobody ever needs that much CPR music. Hopefully they can find a LUCAS or something!

Chain Of Fools

We were going to call this “MRI in the Mourning”, but I like my title better. Even so, have a song.

I heard about this story of a dude with a weight training chain around his neck getting sucked into an MRI machine. I can only stammer and gape and wonder how this was allowed to happen! I feel like this could have been stopped at so many points, and it could be definitely stopped by the MRI tech! Why wasn’t it?

I have had two MRI’s, and the staff made a very big point of asking in many and varied ways if I had any metal in or on me. I had to fill out forms, get asked questions, get asked questions again, lock any metal up that I might have had, get asked some more questions, and then and only then was I brought into the room where the MRI was, the lair of the snuffling beast. Dammit I can’t find just that noise it makes when it’s at rest, but in my twisted mind, I pictured some kind of beast, tightly coiled and waiting for the signal to spring into action. There is no denying that I’m weird.

Anyway, this is what went down according to the story.

  • Adrienne Jones-McAllister was having an MRI on her knee.
  • She had had previous MRI’s at this facility.
  • Her husband Keith had accompanied her to her scans before.
  • For reasons that are not explained, Keith just walks around with a 20-lb weight training chain around his neck.
  • The tech, not sure if it’s the same tech, but techs, have noticed the chain previously, commenting “Oooo that’s a really big chain!”
  • At the end of the scan, it was requested that Keith come in and help his wife off the table. This is Keith, the fella with the weight-training chain, and the table is the MRI table.
  • Keith is summoned by the tech,
  • aaaaaand…doom occurs. Keith is pulled into the MRI machine, waves goodbye and goes limp.
  • They got him out, but he died later.

How did that happen? The lion’s share of the blame goes to the clinic and tech who didn’t stop him and his giant metal chain from approaching the *magnetic* resonance imaging machine. Why did Keith even need to come in the room? Why wasn’t the tech helping her down? But if the tech needed hubby to come in, for the love of Pete, tell him to take off the chain!

But I am kind of surprised that neither of them realized, especially since they’ve been there before, that metal and magnets don’t mix and he should take it off. I have met people who don’t know what an MRI is, but those people have never had one. This woman has, and her husband has been there.

What a completely preventable tragedy.

That Skunk Gave Me The Flu!

I haven’t written in a while, like 3 months, oops. So I thought I’d start with something silly.

Did anyone else hear the song “Sad Songs Say So Much” and think it said “I’ll hold the skunk”? No? Just me?

To be fair to myself, I was only 4 or 5 and the song was playing softly on a crackly radio in the bedroom. But I was laying there in bed thinking “Why do you want to hold a skunk? I mean, that would definitely make me sing some sad songs.”

Of course it says “When all hope is gone”, but there will always be a small part of me that thinks “I’ll hold the skunk”.

And this one came out when I was a little older, Good Thing by the Fine Young Cannibals.

At least this guy mumbles, so I’m not a total idiot. But at the end of the third verse, I was convinced it said “I had the flu.” Now that I’ve heard the real words “like a fool”, I can’t hear “I had the flu” anymore. But I listened to that over and over and over again. Am I the only one? I was convinced this guy’s girlfriend finally came back, and now he had the flu so couldn’t go out and have fun with her. I knew that couldn’t be the real line, but I couldn’t find another one that made any more sense.

So those are a couple of thoughts from my childhood. They just happened to come to me while we listened to music on the balcony.

Pop Goes The…

This is so perfect that if I didn’t know the source was a real place I’d think it was fake.

A priest has been placed on leave for the second time after once again being accused of child sexual abuse. that priest? Peter J. Popadick.

The Diocese of Buffalo placed Monsignor Peter J. Popadick on leave for the second time Wednesday, after previously allowing the priest to return to ministry.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the diocese wrote that Popadick was placed on administrative leave after it received a child sexual abuse complaint.
Popadick serves as the pastor of St. Aloysius Gonzaga in Cheektowaga.
Diocese spokesman Joe Martone told 7 News the claim is more than 20 years old.

So at least no one should try to molest it.

In addition to his work as the pastor at the very fun to say St. Aloysius Gonzaga in Cheektowaga, the article also notes that Popadick had served as the secretary to Bishop Edward D. Head.

Sometimes it really does feel like you’re born for something.

Hello, Wrestling Commentators. I Would Like To Steal A Moment Of Your Time

You’ve been bugging me for a long time with something you all keep saying, so let’s talk about it.

When someone gets rolled up and pinned, the person who pinned him did not steal the win. Stealing a win involves something like a low blow, pulling the tights, having your hands or feet on the ropes, using a foreign object, outside interference, etc. It does not involve being out-wrestled and trapped in a legal manoeuvre for three seconds. I might hear you out if you want to call a situation where a guy gets rolled up while he’s busy yelling at the referee stealing, but even then I tend to disagree. It’s your job as a combatant to be paying attention. You take your eye off the ball and get schoolboyed or whatever, you lose fair and square. Sucks to be you. The only exception is when the ref fast counts you because he’s had it with your shit. Then you might have a case for calling it theft and yelling for a rematch.

But other than that, please, stop calling one guy being the better man stealing. It kind of ruins wrestling a little. Eventually you’re going to create a generation of fans and wrestlers who won’t see any win as legitimate unless it comes after a finishing move, which will take all of the strategy, fun and unpredictability out of the matches. I’m not sure if this is one of those Vince McMahon rules that he drilled into everyone for years or what, but if it is, he’s gone now. So if this could go away too, that would be lovely.

Hulk Hogan Jobs To Dr. Death

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Hulk Hogan these days. He ended up being a Trump supporting racist who chose steroids over the vitamins he told the rest of us to take, never passed up a chance to lie about basically everything (no, Andre the Giant did not weigh 1000 pounds at Wrestlemania 3) and who I really hoped would just go away by the early 2000s, so the less he enters my brain, the better.

But none of that changes the fact that he was my first favourite wrestler or that I literally cried and punched things when Ted DiBiase bought Andre from Bobby Heenan and paid off those twin referees to screw him out of the title back in 88.

Or that I was worried King Kong Bundy had killed him in 86.

Or that I watched him and Mr. Wonderful in the cage probably 100 times.

Or that him suplexing Big Boss man off of the cage made me jump out of my chair.

Or that he somehow managed to have a great match with the Ultimate Warrior at Mania six.

Or that him turning heel and joining the NWO was one of the craziest things I’d ever seen.

Or that I watched “NO Holds Barred” more than once for some reason.

Or that “Real American” might be the best theme music ever.

Or that “American Made” was pretty damn good too.

I could go on all day, because love him or hate him, he was a huge part of my childhood. And even though I spent more time kinda hating him than anything else, I still have a ton of fun family memories and some of my best friends because of him, and I’m grateful for that. It sucks that we all have to get older and that in the end, nobody Hulks up on Father Time forever.

Note: I wish the title was my idea, but it was a text from a friend at which I laughed heartily.