Shut Up, Team Prime Minister

My god, the balls on this guy.

Canadians pull together? We work as a team? That’s how we get big things done? By finding ways to work together? It’s what we always do? Whatever you say, Mr. only person in the whole damn country who is convinced that nobody is working with him so we need to have an election that’s probably going to cost more than any election we’ve ever had and not solve anything to anyone’s satisfaction.

Maybe stick to running on the good parts of your record and leave the sentimental stuff to people who aren’t the entire reason for the season.

What If Blink-182 Had Written Don’t Stop Believin’?

Had I not known what this was ahead of time, there’s a pretty solid chance it would have fooled me, at least for a while. The music and vocals are pretty much spot on.

If you ever wondered how Mark and Tom would sound on the iconic melodies of Don’t Stop Believin, you’re in luck today! I turned a 4+ min song into barely 3 minutes, just like Blink 182 would want.

Chinese People Are Still Throwing Coins Into Plane Engines For Luck. It’s Still A Bad Idea

If the airplane COVID doesn’t kill you, perhaps the paper-wrapped coins some putz chucked into the engine will. Yes, people are still doing that.

It wasn’t Lucky Air this time, but they did fall victim to this phenomenon again in 2020, according to the story. In that case, a 28-year-old man was ordered to pay a fine of 120000 yuan ($23,696.80 Canadian) to the airline for its trouble.

The incident reportedly took place at an airport in Weifang. A male passenger, identified with the last name Wang, was scheduled to fly from Weifang to Haiku on a Beibu Gulf Airlines flight GX8814 when he threw a handful of coins into the engine.
Fortunately, the staff was soon alerted about the coins in the engine after workers found coins on the ground during the pre-takeoff inspection.
Wang reportedly admitted having thrown six coins wrapped in red paper inside the plane’s engine.

The staff managed to recover all the coins but the flight had to be cancelled due to safety concerns. All 148 passengers were forced to do deboard and wait for another flight until the next morning.
Following the incident, WAng was detained by the police.

You Do Not Owe The Ontario Progressive Conservatives Any Money

From time to time, I get emails from shifty marketing and search optimization scumbags. Their letters are marked as coming from somewhere important sounding like domain services. They tell me that I owe a balance of a few hundred dollars and that if I don’t pay up, I will lose access to either my entire website or important components of it. Way down at the bottom there’s a tiny note that this is not a real invoice and no money is actually due, but they don’t expect anyone to read that far and it’s only there so they can say that they didn’t do anything out of line if someone decides to call them on it. What they’re hoping is that I’ll see that it’s a bill, pay it and then wind up on the hook for expensive and useless services and that I’ll keep paying for them without questioning why. Fortunately I’m pretty with it most of the time and have a good handle on who I pay for what and how much I have to pay them to keep the site running. But not everyone is that way especially the bigger the company is, which is why these scams work.

Now imagine you got a letter like the one I just described, but instead of coming from some random internet dipshit, it came from the Ontario government. Technically it came from the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, but as far as most normal people are concerned, that’s the same thing. The PCs, after all, are currently the government of Ontario. It’s hard to believe that something like this would ever happen because of how unethical, possibly illegal and astoundingly dumb it would be for anyone to actually try it, but here we are.

Part of the letter is labelled “invoice” and looks like a bill to be sent to the Ontario PCs in Toronto. The only line item says “Election Readiness Fund” and lists a total of $300, then lower down the page states there’s a “balance due.” The word donation does appear, but only at the bottom of the page.
The letter includes two pages. The first is a standard letter explaining the need for the PCs to fundraise ahead of next year’s election, but the second is the part that looks like an invoice. Part of the letter says “Please pay the enclosed invoice to send Doug Ford the message that we’ve got his back.”

Even the envelope is designed to make you think it’s a bill, as it features highlighted text that reads “Important: invoice enclosed.” You can see a picture of that at the above link.

All of the other parties and at least one private citizen have filed complaints with some combination of Elections Ontario, the Ontario Provincial Police fraud unit and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, as they should. The OPP says that it is looking into whether a full criminal investigation is needed, while Elections Ontario has told the NDP and the CBC that the contents of the letter aren’t in its purview. That means, basically, that they can’t investigate it, crazy as that sounds.

Heads should roll for this, obviously. Not only now, but also come election time. The fundraising arm of the party knew exactly what it was doing when it designed these. The intent is to trick people, especially the elderly and the vulnerable. And if they can snag a few Joe Averages who aren’t paying enough attention because they have other things on their minds, even better. There is no other reason why these letters would look like they do, and the fact that no one spoke up and said that any of it was wrong speaks volumes about the sort of people who inhabit the Progressive Conservative Party. This was not an honest mistake.

Lou Ottens Twisted Up And Eaten At 94

Say what you want about cassettes. They’re easy to destroy. They don’t sound so hot once they start to wear. But for my money, there has never been a format that made audio more universally accessible. You could take your music anywhere, and you could capture anything you wanted quickly and with ease just by pressing a button. And you could do it all for a very reasonable price.

Cassettes were a huge part of my life for a very long time. From the time I was old enough to remember things right up until my early 20s, I used them every day. I bought most of my music that way until I finally got a CD player for Christmas when I was 15, and even after that I would still record things off the radio and from borrowed CDs because we were still in the time before everyone had access to decent internet or even CD burners. I would record myself. I would record other people. I would record things off the TV so I could listen to them while I fell asleep at night. I made mixtapes (ask Carin about some of those). Ahh hell. I’m making myself miss cassettes right now. They were so useful.
Lou Ottens, Inventor Of The Cassette Tape, Has Died

The cassette tape was Ottens’ answer to the large reel-to-reel tapes that provided high-quality sound but were seen as too clunky and expensive. He took on the challenge of shrinking tape technology in the early 1960s, when he became the head of new product development in Hasselt, Belgium, for the Dutch-based Philips technology company.
“Lou wanted music to be portable and accessible,” says documentary filmmaker Zack Taylor, who spent days with Ottens for his film Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape.
Ottens’ goal was to make something simple and affordable for anyone to use. As Taylor says, “He advocated for Philips to license this new format to other manufacturers for free, paving the way for cassettes to become a worldwide standard.”

Ottens was famously unsentimental about the invention that has accounted for some 100 billion sales, according to NRC. In a career devoted to seeking higher fidelity and advancing technology, he dismissed tapes as primitive and prone to noise and distortion.

And one more thing I appreciate about them that I thought of later and couldn’t find a way to fit in up top. They made you get to know an album more than you have to now, for better or worse. It was more of a pain to skip tracks, so you tended to listen all the way through more often, or at least you did until you figured out exactly where the things worth a repeat listen were and either stopped it when they were done, found them on the tape as best you could or dubbed them onto a different cassette with only the good songs of the moment on it. Once CDs hit and especially now with downloading and streaming, it was much easier to hear just what you wanted rather than listening to an album front to back. Doing that now sometimes feels more like a chore than anything else. It’s great to have all of the hits and things we want to hear on demand, but I feel like a lot of pretty good music is going undiscovered or under-appreciated as a result.

Looks Like I’m An NDP Voter Again

Not because of any idea they have in particular although they generally have some pretty good ones. My choice is based on a really, really bad idea the Liberals had. I will absolutely not be rewarding this kind of selfish, irresponsible behaviour with my vote in September.

Saying that, by the way, makes me a little sad. The Liberals have done a very good job of steering us through what is hopefully a once in a lifetime set of circumstances. They haven’t always been perfect, but no one could have been. The important thing is that they’ve tended to get more right than they’ve gotten wrong, and had they not decided to take us down unnecessary election road just now I likely would have been content giving them the nod in 2023. But calling an election now for reasons that serve no one’s interests aside from those of the Liberal Party has pissed away a lot of the good will they had built up with me, not to mention any credibility they had left after years of broken promises and sketchy ethics. You can’t repeatedly tell me that the health, safety and stability of the people are of paramount importance to your government and then expect me to keep taking you seriously when you decide to force those people to wait in long lines while we’re quite clearly still in the midst of fighting an extremely contagious disease.

Am I personally concerned about voting? Not really. I’m vaccinated. Chances are I’ll be fine. But that doesn’t mean I want to vote right now. No one does. No one I can find, at least. Parliament was functioning fine enough for most of us. Trudeau can say whatever he wants about us needing our say on post pandemic recovery and the work that will need to be done, but there’s still work to be done now, and by forcing this vote he’s shirking those responsibilities and costing us millions of dollars that could be put to much better use.

From the podium outside of Rideau Hall this morning, Trudeau pushed back against his critics, saying Canadians deserve a chance to decide who should guide the country out of the pandemic.
“In this pivotal, consequential moment, who wouldn’t want a say? Who wouldn’t want their chance to help decide where our country goes from here?” he said.

“So to the other parties, please explain why you don’t think Canadians should get a choice, why you don’t think that this is a pivotal moment. I’m focused on our real plan. I’m focused on the path forward.”

Eat It, Boneless Chicken Wings

I’m glad there are still folks out there who are willing to stand up and take on the big issues. Seriously, what the hell is a boneless chicken wing anyway? It really is just a damn nugget, and most of the time it’s not even a very good one. Thank you for speaking out, Andrew Christensen of Lincoln, Nebraska. I’m sure your father is extremely proud.

I ordered boneless wings once. It was at a KFC back in like 2004. They were awful. I have no idea what the sauce that came with them was, but it did little to improve the quality of the powdery tasting chicken. Chicken, for the record, should never be accurately described as powdery. There was also no relief to be found in the accompanying tater tots, which attacked my tongue with a quite unpleasant assault of batter coated vinegar and water shrapnel. I stay away from the boneless wings everywhere now, just to be safe. To be safe, and because boneless wings do not truly exist.

NirvanA.I

The guy who brought us “Nobody Died Every Single Day” A.K.A. the AI Nickelback song has given Nirvana the same treatment.

I knew this was getting posted as soon as we hit the line about eating your heart-shaped box for food.

Using lyrics.rip to scrape the Genius Lyrics Database, I made a Markov Chain write Nirvana lyrics. This is the end result- “Smother”.

All music/vocals performed, mixed, and mastered by me, in my kitchen, on a sparkly red cheap Stratocaster, a crappy mic, and an old copy of ProTools. All lyrics provided by Hal 9000 (AKA lyrics.rip). Guitars are the aforementioned Stratocaster bounced hard left and right. Flanged Stratocaster through a Fender twin is dead center in the mix. Bass is a no-name bass run through amp emulation. Percussion is Superior Drummer 2. I know Dave Grohl hates computer drums but it’s the best thing I got, soooo…. Sorry Dave. I still love you.

Vocals are doubled, slightly compressed, and run though an emulated reel-to-reel and tube saturation for a bit of extra warmth and grit. Also the first use of my new pop filter that my wife bought me for early father’s day. She’s the best.

PLEEEEEEASE GET VACCINATED!

I apologize in advance if this post doesn’t make a whole heap of sense. Every time I think about writing it, if my brain were a car, it would be spinning its wheels on ice trying to take all my thoughts and turn them into something simple to understand. I want what I write down to be convincing, but I’m not an expert, so I’m trying to take what I’ve read and synthesize it into something that makes sense, and I don’t have all the answers. But I guess I never will, so I just have to go with what I have.

I’m going to try the best I can to answer every question I can think of about COVID vaccines, so maybe, just maybe, I can convince a few people who aren’t sure about them to get vaccinated. I know I’m not going to convince anybody who has decided not to listen, but I hope maybe I can reach a few who have some questions and aren’t sure. Questions are good, so let’s have what counts for answers right now.

I guess I’ll start with the easiest

Do vaccines make you magnetic?
If they do, it hasn’t happened to Steve or I.
Seriously, no. There is nothing in the vaccine that could possibly make you magnetic. You are more likely to have magnetizing particles in your iron supplements or iron-fortified breakfast cereals, which are most of them. But you might have seen videos of people sticking spoons to the area where they got vaccinated, as proof that they were magnetically drawn to the vaccine area. The reason the spoons are sticking to them is due to something called Van Der Waals forces. Basically, either the person is sweaty, or that spot is especially smooth, so the spoon will stick there. Plus, spoons are usually not made of iron so aren’t so magnetic anyway.

Do the COVID vaccines contain microchips?
Short answer is nope. This one was fun to learn about. There are teeny weeny microchips being designed to allow for wireless monitoring of things like body temperature, but a. they can’t transmit their data through the air so someone would have to scrape an ultrasound wand along your body to check on their data, and b. they’re only sorta kinda trying them in mice so far. The point is no one could track you with these microchips. They would have to get so close to you that they might as well track you with the naked eye. If they wanted to embed a chip that had the capacity to send RF transmissions, they would have to use a way bigger needle. Even then, in order to read what data it could hold, which isn’t much, they’d have to get right up to you and wave an RF reader around. No, not conspicuous at all. Again, they might as well track you with the human eye at that point.

Can the vaccines get into your DNA and change it?
Nope, not according to everything I’ve read. This one was also kind of fun to read about. I love being able to answer with more than “pffft nope. Are you nuts?” Here’s the thing, as best as I can understand it. There is a big difference between RNA and DNA. DNA has the actual programming code in it to build cells and things and it needs to have contact with the nucleus. RNA is like downloading a programming manual, and the MRNA vaccines are like programming pamphlets about the spike proteins on this Coronavirus. RNA doesn’t talk to the nucleus, but passes on the message to the cell, who makes some spike proteins, which our immune system sees as an intruder and murders them. It never met the whole virus, just the spiky things on the outside. So if it meets the virus later on, it goes “Ah! Spiky things! I’ve seen you before! Chaaarge!”

But the whole changing your DNA thing came from somewhere, but that somewhere was the wrong place. Some actual viruses, like HIV and HPV, do their reproducing thing by invading the cell’s DNA and sticking themselves on any old place they can find a spot. If that causes cancer, the virus doesn’t care. It got what it wanted and made some viral friends and now it couldn’t give two craps about its host. But this is what a virus does, not the vaccine. Vaccines are designed to only function long enough to teach the immune system a lesson about what to do in the future, and then they get to find out how good a student the immune system was by being devoured by it.

The funny part is there’s a chance that the full-fledged coronavirus has the ability to slap itself onto your DNA and integrate itself into your cells, although there is disagreement. But its vaccine can’t do that since it doesn’t get into the nucleus. If you’re worried about growing a tail, all the more reason to get the shot.

why did they choose MRNA anyway?
For a few reasons. First, MRNA vaccines can be created rapidly, which is what we needed because people were dropping like flies. Second, using MRNA means we don’t have to inject people with actual virus, either weakened or dead. We just have to give our cells the recipe for the spike proteins. Third, hopefully this will help make mutated versions of the virus still recognizable to the immune system, where if we used the whole virus, then it might not recognize mutations.

How could they whip these out so fast?
This is the most reasonable question there is. The answer is a whole mix of reasons. First, this post explains a bunch of them. It’s the whole idea that tons of people came together because we all needed this vaccine and pooled resources like they should do a lot more often.
Second, some of these companies, like Moderna, had already done a bunch of research on vaccines because of the original SARS virus, so they just had to tweak it to fit this virus.
Finally, in the case of the MRNA vaccines, there has been MRNA work for years for treating stuff like cancer, so it’s not like they dreamed it up out of nowhere for this vaccine. We just didn’t hear about it. I think they were under pressure to get something out there, but for the most part, I think they pulled it off pretty well.

What’s the point of getting vaccinated if you can still catch it and spread it?
Believe me, it’s frustrating to think I’ve done all of this and maybe I could still catch COVID or give it to someone else. But the research seems to be indicating that if a vaccinated person does catch COVID, most of them are not sick at all and find out they have it when they are required to get a test for some reason, or they feel kinda crappy for a couple of days and that’s that. If an unvaccinated person catches it, they may get that lucky, or they may end up dealing with after-effects for months, end up in the hospital, end up in the ICU or die. The data coming in seems to indicate that of the people being hospitalized, 96 percent weren’t fully vaccinated. The latest stats indicate that Yes, very few vaccinated people have ended up in the hospital or died from COVID, 7525 out of 164 million in the U.S, or 0.004 percent, but usually there’s a reason for that. Their immune systems are fighting other battles so didn’t learn the lesson the vaccine came to teach them, or they’re just worn down because the person is extremely old. The sucky part is they took a chance on the vaccine and still kind of lost, but if they hadn’t gotten the vaccine and they caught COVID, it would have been even worse. Some of the ones that only ended up in the hospital after vaccination may have died without it, and the ones who died anyway certainly would have died if they weren’t vaccinated. But for most people, the outcome is definitely better if you get the vaccine.

It’s kind of like wearing a seat belt while riding in a car. It’s not going to save you from everything, but your chances of reducing harm in an accident are much higher than if you were thrown out of the car at high speed. Just read this graphic description of what happens to the non-seat belted. Being unvaccinated is like being non-seat belted. If you run into COVID, you will have the greatest chance of the worst possible outcome. If you get vaccinated, or wear your seat belt, you may still get hurt, but less so.

On the spreading side, research is constantly changing because this is an evolving thing, but it seems like if you’re vaccinated, you spew less virus if you do happen to catch it, the chance of which is way lower. So you can still spread it, but for less time and to less people, and the more vaccinated people there are, the less harm this stupid virus can cause. If you spread it to another vaccinated person, chances are they get a sniffle and feel like garbage for a day. Whoopdy doo. That’s what we want, to turn COVID into Whoopdy doo as much as possible.

Finally, if you’re vaccinated, you kill it off faster, which means it’s less likely to mutate, which means it’s less likely to make a variant that says “I spit in the face of your immune response!” If you’re not vaccinated, it can have more time to use your immune system as a training ground to make a bigger badder better version of itself.

I don’t want to be part of an experiment.
Then I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. You are already part of one. Anyone who chooses not to be vaccinated is part of the control group, i.e. the ones getting no protection and letting nature take its course. A lot more of them are winding up in ICU’s and hospital beds than those in the experimental group, i.e. the vaccinated. What was the number I mentioned above? 96 percent locally were not fully vaccinated?

So and So died right after they got the shot.
And what was also happening with So and So? I knew someone who claimed they passed out due to the vaccine. We came to find out that the passing out happened two days after vaccination when she went out and lounged on a beach in the hot, hot sun. Correlation is not causation. There have been adverse events that happened to people, definitely there have been. But we are all very complex human beings and it’s hard to know exactly what happened. Maybe someone was super anxious about getting the vaccine, got it, and then had a heart attack because of the stress. Did they die after getting the vaccine? Yes, but it was caused by something else. Many many people have gotten vaccinated, and there has not been a massive influx of people winding up in the ER. Of course, check with your doctor to see if you should get it, but if you have anything resembling a functioning immune system, you should be fine.

I’m going to be infertile if I get vaccinated!
Nope. If you’re a woman, the immune system’s antibodies won’t go after the proteins used to make placenta. They’re not as similar to the antibodies as they might look. And if you’re a guy, your little sperm are just as swimmy as they were before. But you know what can mess up your hormone balance? Being thwacked to the earth by a COVID infection. That’ll do it for sure.

what about the blood clots?
This one is a bit of a risk-benefit analysis. There’s a chance that you could get a blood clot from at least one of the vaccines, about 1 in 100000. But if you contract COVID, which gets easier and easier to do, especially if we decide to just let things go back to normal, your risk of blood clot, among many other things, is much much higher. If you contract COVID, even if you don’t go to the hospital, your chances are 1 in 100 that you’ll have a blood clot.

Why do you care? You got vaccinated.
That’s not how vaccines work. Getting one isn’t like having an impenetrable shield that COVID hits with a clang and falls to earth. It depends on as many of the community as possible getting vaccinated so that the virus can’t spread and mutate. The more of us that are vaccinated, the stronger that shield gets, but one vaccinated person is only as protected as his neighbours. There are a few people who can’t get the vaccine, and for their sake, the rest of us need to get it so those people are less likely to encounter the virus.

Picture one guy with a garden hose trying to fight a wildfire. The poor fellow doesn’t have a prayer. But if we all get out our hoses and cover more area, we might be able to slow down the fire, and if fire pops up again, we’ll still have enough hoses to control it.

Or picture the different armies commanded by different countries. Some countries have all the fancy weaponry. They have nukes and missiles and big ol’ guns and drones that can be controlled with a weird video game interface. Some countries aren’t so lucky. They have some ships and some planes, but their bombs and missiles can’t reach as far. Other countries are less lucky still, and have some used navy ships sold to them by other countries. Maybe they have a dude with a big rifle sitting up top trying to pick off what he can.

All of the armies go to a training exercise teaching them how to detect a new enemy and defeat it. But even with these lessons, some of them will sustain more damage before they fight it off than others because a rifle bullet will do less damage than a targeted smart bomb.

I am one of the countries with the less efficient ships and planes. Your grandma might have the used navy ships. For the sake of us, the more allies we have with nukes around, the more chance the threat can be eliminated before the less equipped armies’ defenses have to mobilize. But if your armies don’t go to training school, they won’t recognize the virus, which is like allowing spies to get in, learn about our defenses, and find ways to circumvent them. Please be our allies.

We should just aim for herd immunity.
Yup, and the way to do that is with vaccination. I don’t want to live in a world where we do it naturally. Have we not learned anything from the last 18 ish months? Exposing people to a full blast of COVID doesn’t end well for many of us, even though it works out to a small percentage of everyone who has been exposed. But a small percentage is still a huuuuge number of people. *breaks out calculator*
our world’s population is 7.9 billion.
The number we need to infect to reach herd immunity, if the figure of 70 percent of the population is to be believed, is 5.5 billion. But it may be higher because I’ve heard 80 percent and 90 percent thrown around. But let’s aim low and see what happens.
of those infected, usually 20 percent have cases that are serious enough to wind up in the hospital. That’s 1.1 billion around the world. That’s a huuuuge number of people who technically recover but are dealing with lingering symptoms, a huuuuge number of people who have new conditions, a huuuuge number of people who could die. About a tenth of those, so 2 percent of overall infections, die. That’s 110.6 million.
Yup. That’s “A lot of fucking dead people.”

And while we’re reaching this herd immunity by fire, our health care systems are stretched so thin that people with non-COVID problems can’t be treated because there is literally nowhere to put them.

We haven’t even come close to herd immunity. Currently, we have had 203 million cases around the world, and 4.3 million deaths, and look at the problems we’ve seen. Why on Earth would we choose the natural herd immunity route when we have a much more painless way to get there?

The 1918 flu went away on its own. Won’t this one do the same?
Yes, given enough time and enough carnage. That flu managed to infect up to a third of the world’s population depending on the source of stats before it went away. But our population is at least four times as big as it was then and many times more mobile. Nobody was flying around the world in 1918. It still spread because of soldiers on ships, but I think it would spread even faster now. I think the only way back to something resembling normal is to get as many people vaccinated as humanly possible.

I just want to wait a little longer.
Serious question, but what are you waiting for? 4.4 billion doses of vaccine have been administered around the world. The only thing I’m seeing is a stark difference between the number of vaccinated versus unvaccinated people landing in hospitals and a much smaller death count. And the longer you wait, the more inconvenient it will be to get your shots. Right now, there are all sorts of mass vaccination options open to you. But as the demand drops, they will start to close down. If you don’t believe me, take it from this doctor here. You can still get them, but the options won’t be so plentiful. Right now, you don’t even have to book your appointment. More often than not, You can just walk in and say you want your covid shot and they’ll give it to you. But soon, you’ll have to go to your doctor to get them.

So this is the part where I get down on my knees and beg anyone who hasn’t been vaccinated. Please get your shots unless you absolutely positively can’t. You will be helping to move us out of this mess. It is the one thing we can all do to bring back our lives, and I really want mine back.

And if all of that wasn’t enough, read this message from that same doctor. She summed up very quickly a bunch of what I spent 13 hours or so writing.