Aaaaaaa! Warm Sleep!

I would have had no idea that anything had gone wrong had I not read about it in the news, but this week’s big Amazon Web Services outage most definitely affected a whole lot of others. This is, I’m sure we can all agree, very bad.

But there’s one aspect of it that has me personally feeling downright gleeful.

Among those impacted were the dinguses who bought those stupid smart beds I wrote about in June.

On Monday, users of Eight Sleep’s “Pod” mattress toppers – a near $2,000, three-layer mattress, that according to the company can be customized to “achieve the perfect mix of temperature control and comfort”- took to X and Reddit to voice their frustrations.
“I need to change the alarm in the morning, but the app won’t open. Tried restarting and even tried logging in on iPad, and won’t log in,” a Reddit User shared. “I feel like I’m held hostage to their app not working. I have no way to change the alarm now. Wtf?”
Another Sleep Eight user shared that their “girlfriend’s side of the bed set itself to 110 f and won’t turn down. Nightmare.”
CEO of Eight Sleep Matteo Franceschetti acknowledged the frustrations in an X post Monday evening.
“That is not the experience we want to provide, and I want to apologize for it.”

And then the company announced this, which is truly the mark of a detail oriented organization that unquestionably has every last bit of its shit together.

Franceschetti followed the apology with a promise to restore “all the features as AWS comes back,” and a commitment to “outage-proofing your Pod experience,” a process he said Eight Sleep would be working “the whole night+24/7,” to build so that the problem is “fixed extremely quickly.”
The company’s co-founder Alexandra Zatarain told the The Verge that shipments of the new “outage mode” began on Tuesday, allowing “the app to communicate with Pod devices over Bluetooth when cloud infrastructure is unavailable.”
“During an outage, you’ll still be able to open the app, turn the Pod on/off, change temperature levels, and flatten the base,” Zatarain told The Verge.

I seriously cannot believe this, even though I simultaneously oh so totally can.

Nobody, from conceptualization to construction to marketing to consumer, ever bothered asking “hey, what happens if the internet goes down”?

Great work all around, everyone. You all deserve every bit of your shitty week.

In Which I Use Pierre Poilievre To Teach An Important Lesson

I don’t have a clue what Pierre Poilievre looks like, but jesus christ, that voice!

Gaaaaah!

Every time I hear him talk, there are two thoughts I can’t shake:

  1. Even if we agreed on every issue in the world, I’d still want to slap the crap out of him.
  2. If you told me a guy who sounds like that has stacks of Rubbermaids full of stolen underwear in his basement or at least one person buried in his back yard, I’d probably believe you. Dude is just so…weird!

I’m glad to get that out in the open. Not just because dunking on this clown is a righteous pursuit, but because I want you to remember this post the next time some goober tells you that because blind people can’t see, that they are forced to look deeper rather than being superficial like so much of the world. I assure you, we can be superficial as hell. But like most other things in life, we just have to do it a little differently.

Some Things I Wrote Down

I thought I was finally starting to get a bit better at the posting thing again, but I’ve hit another wall, it seems. So maybe I’ll try jotting some stuff down and posting it when it feels right. Making myself do this in the usual ways hasn’t worked in years, so maybe this will. It’ll be like Twitter, but all at once and I’m the only shithead.

  • Some of you know us so have an idea of what I’m on about when I mention not being able to write, but for the benefit of everyone else, I’ll lay a couple of recent happenings on you.
    • Over the summer, I lost my grandpa. Someday I hope to write a whole post about that, but I don’t know when that day might be. I’m having a horrible time getting started, and once I do start, I’m not sure I’ll know where to stop. His house was like a second home to us, and in some ways he was much more a dad to me than my actual dad. I have so many memories, and it’s been extremely hard to settle them down enough to form them into something coherent. If I’m being honest, I don’t think I’m close to ready for it yet. I’m sure it’ll feel good when I am, but for now I feel better experiencing it with people I love when I have to than talking at a world full of strangers about it. He was such a presence in all of our lives, and we’re still figuring out how to move on without it. Slowly but surely we are, but it’s especially difficult when you’re just starting to learn what it’s like to live through some of his favourite things without him. We got to spend a year longer with him than we thought we would, which is a blessing and a curse. The blessing part is obvious, but to call that year a struggle would be so charitable of me that I should probably get a tax receipt for it. the feeling of watching the clock run out on someone with no idea when it’s going to hit 0 is damn near indescribable and not something I would wish on almost anyone.
    • Then, a couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a friend I hadn’t heard from in a while. Because those sorts of things don’t happen for fun reasons a whole lot these days, the news she had was that one of our mutual friends had died of cancer. From what I was told, he didn’t want many people to know he was going through it or how bad it was. Knowing him, that sounds about right. The two of us didn’t talk much in later years beyond a how’s it going or a here’s something funny now and then, but we had a lot of fun together back in the day. We were constantly cracking each other up with just the dumbest shit. Sometimes it was even fit for public consumption, like the Bob and Harry announcements we did to promote our school’s staff vs. student hockey game. We were in a band together. No disrespect intended to the rest of us, but he was easily the most talented guy in that thing. If there was a style he couldn’t drum at least decently, I don’t remember it. He was a pretty good cook, too. He loved sports more than anyone I’ve ever met. I’m not sure it would be much of an exaggeration to say that he knew things about sports that I didn’t even know were sports. We didn’t always see eye to eye on certain things, which is, at least from my side, why we wound up slowly drifting apart. There was never a big blowup and I never held a grudge, which is comforting now given how things turned out and how hard it hit me. I’ll miss ya, buddy.
    • I could keep on with this theme, but naah. I know Carin is trying to write something of her own about it, so I’ll let her take it from here. But she’s kinda in my boat. Words are hard when life isn’t always into letting up.
  • Good things do still happen to us sometimes, though. Over the summer we got to see Weird Al in Toronto. I don’t have many dream concerts, but that was definitely one, and it was everything I could have hoped for. If you were to ask me to complain about anything it would be that some of the songs I hoped to hear in full ended up crammed into a medley, but when you have that much material there’s no way to get it all in. But what an amazing, funny, energetic night. So good I didn’t even mind the rain, and I haaaaaaate getting rained on.
  • And in the last couple of weeks we also saw Honeymoon Suite and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Really enjoyed both, but I think as the years go by the Dirt Band will stick with me more. I don’t know what I was expecting going in, but whatever it was, they blew it away.
  • We’ve got plans to hit a bunch more shows before the year is out and even a few lined up for 2026. I don’t know when exactly we got back to thinking about these things in terms of that would be fun instead of are we sure we have the energy or the mood for that, but it’s nice.
  • I still can’t frigging believe that the Jays are going to the World Series. You wana talk about blowing away expectations? That’s it, right there. When the season started I expected nothing beyond that it would be spring and then summertime, because that’s how orbit works. But Blue Jays baseball any more meaningful than baseball in general is when you’re a fan and you like to relax to it? Forget it. And yet, here we are.

    I’ll admit I was worried when I heard that Vlad showed up at the dome in Leafs gear. I do my best not to be the superstitious type, but Leafs in game seven hasn’t exactly given off the I’m a winner vibe in like 20 years. But again, here we are. I’m still not sure if John Schneider has his head all the way around how to properly manage a pitching staff, but yup, you guessed it, here we are. If you’re looking for a prediction, I don’t have one. My head says the Dodgers are going to kill us, but of course my heart disagrees. It might even be starting to convince my head, because why not? What else about this Jays season has made any damn sense? I mean, here we are! Let’s fuckin goooooo!

  • Jansen Visconti does not sound like a person’s name. Jansen Visconti sounds like a cheap wine that someone who doesn’t drink wine finds in the back of a cupboard and serves at Christmas dinner.
  • On the subject of names, does anyone in Canadian politics at the moment have a more fun one to say out loud than Gary Anandasangaree? He sounds like he should be the main character in an Irish Rovers song. Seriously, picture it over anything that sounds vaguely like this and tell me I’m wrong.

    🎵Gary Anandasangaree comes rollin’ through the bay. And when we see asangaree we stop and shout hurray! ‘Cause everyone here is out of beer and backed up on their pay, but Gary Anandasangaree has come to save the day!🎵

And now that I’ve hopefully put a song in all your heads, I’ll leave things there.

That went ok, I think. Maybe I’ll try it again. Who knows? The world is nutty sometimes, you guys. Just do the best you can out there.

Is Somebody Scamming?

It’s crazy enough that this scam worked once, but now it’s worked twice, and on women in the same country, no less!

A Japanese octogenarian was swindled out of thousands of dollars after falling in love online with a self-described astronaut who sought her help to avert a spaceship crisis, police said Tuesday.
The hapless woman in Japan’s northern Hokkaido island met the fraudster in July on social media who claimed to be a male astronaut, a local police officer told AFP, describing the case as a romance scam.
After some exchanges, the scammer one day told her he was “in space on a spaceship right now” but was “under attack and in need of oxygen,” the official said.
The scammer then urged her to pay him online to help him buy oxygen, and successfully hoodwinked around 1 million yen ($6,700) out of her.

Thanks to Carin for suggesting the title and soundtrack after the first one. It doesn’t fit quite as perfectly this time, but better late than never.

Yeah, Ya Did

I hadn’t thought about it until I came across this story just now, but how can it possibly be that more things don’t get set on fire while “We Didn’t Start the Fire” blasts away nearby? Or at the very least, how come I don’t hear about them if in fact there are more? My first instinct is that it doesn’t happen because while those people may be arsonists, liars they are not. But then I remember that most of the world has danced to “Every Breath You Take” as if it’s a love song, so there’s almost no chance that logic has any part to play here. It certainly didn’t this time, at least.

As detailed in a probable cause statement, Duluth Police Department officers were dispatched to the duplex around 4 AM following a 911 call. When first responders arrived, “they saw the upstairs apartment in flames with ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ blaring from the upstairs apartment.”
Carlson, who purchased the building in 2005, lives upstairs and rents out the downstairs space in the property, which was built in 1901.
The downstairs tenant told cops that he was awoken by the sounds of Carlson “smashing glass and breaking things” inside the upstairs unit. A neighbor reported seeing Carlson “wearing a helmet and smashing his own windows” around 3:30 AM. The witness added that he saw Carlson “under his truck with gas cans, going in and out of the house” before seeing “a flash like a fireball come from the upstairs apartment.”
Arson investigators discovered “a drilled hole in the gas tank of the Defendant’s truck” and “lids to gas cans laying on the ground by the truck.” Additionally, a drill was found nearby.
The downstairs tenant told cops that after Carlson laid ruin to his own apartment for 20 minutes, he knocked on the tenant’s door to announce, “The house is on fire.”

If anyone knows why this happened, they don’t seem to be talking. Not that we’d understand much of it if they did, but you know.

All I can tell you at the moment is that Travis Carlson, who could have been spending the better part of the next 20 years in prison if sentenced to the maximum on his first degree arson charge, instead received three years probation.

Jimmy Kimmel Is Back On TV. Maybe Miracles Are Real

I think I said everything I had to say about this last week, so I’ll try to keep things short so you can just go ahead and watch the 28 minute video.

I’m genuinely surprised that Kimmel got his show back. Given the current refusal of any corporate giant to do the bare ass minimum to stand up for anything even remotely resembling what’s right, I figured he would quietly fade away while we all got distracted by the next stupid Trump thing. Just watch this senile orange dipshit try to pronounce Acetaminophen.

Anyway, I’m glad that for the moment, good sense and free speech won out. But it’s only a battle you’ve won, America. the war isn’t over. Don’t forget that.

As for the monologue, I don’t think it could have been handled much better. He hit every serious point he needed to hit, gave credit where it was due to right wingers who spoke out against what the government was trying to do to him which is how things mostly used to work, and even found time to be funny (the new FCC chairman is a particular highlight).

Just Call It The CFNFL And Get It Over With

The CFL announced a bunch of rule changes yesterday that will be phased in over the next few years and I’ve gotta tell ya, I don’t think I like ’em much.

Ok, so maybe that’s not totally fair. I’m sure some of it will be fine, and perhaps even good. If the play clock can get things moving along a little faster like the pitch clock has in baseball, for instance, it’s hard to see how that can be anything but a positive.

But this shortening the field business? You can pack that shit up and get it the fuck right out of here.

First of all, the whole premise it’s supposedly built on feels to me like a faulty one. Admittedly I don’t watch every game, but I’ve seen my share. And whenever I do watch, I never come away thinking that this right here is a league with a scoring problem. There’s an expression you often hear when people talk about Canadian football. “No lead is safe”. You hear it a lot because it tends to be true. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stepped away from a game to deal with something or other only to come back to a score that’s completely flipped. that doesn’t happen because no one can find a frigging end zone. Is every game a barnburner? Of course not. But that would be the case regardless of what rules you change. But for me as a fan, the three downs as opposed to four and the longer field is exactly what makes even the less entertaining ones more exciting than they would be otherwise.

And that leads me to my biggest issue. I don’t watch the NFL, and I don’t want to. I watch the CFL because I think it’s better football. I understand that adapting is sometimes necessary, but setting us on a path toward complete NFLification isn’t adapting, it’s chasing an impossible dream. The CFL will never be the NFL, no matter how much some folks would like it to be (How ya doin’, MLSE?). People who prefer the NFL have plenty of options to get their fix from the actual NFL. I can’t imagine most of them having much need for a low budget, sad sack clone of it. Meanwhile, those of us who would like to support a CFL are eventually going to be left with nothing.

Yes, it would be nice to see the league grow and become more financially stable, especially in cities where losing money is a problem. But there have got to be better ways of accomplishing that than hollowing out and selling out the Canadian game until it’s no longer recognizable as the Canadian game.

Why Does Larry Mellott Sound So Young Now?

For a lot of reasons, I’ve been way more behind on even more things than usual for quite a while now. One of those things, I have just come to discover, is that Larry Mellott retired from calling Guelph Storm games at the end of last season.

Congrats on a great run, Larry! It won’t be the same without you, but you’ve certainly earned it.

He says that one of the main reasons he’s decided to hang it up is the health of some family members. We can certainly relate to that, especially these last few years. Here’s hoping for the best for everyone.

So what happens now? Who gets the task of trying to replace a local legend?

That would be Dylan Baker, who at just 19 years old already has a fair bit of experience.

Baker has been the voice of the Greater Ontario Junior Hockey League’s Komoka Kings since the fall of 2019. That is where, at 13, he got the broadcast bug.
“I think I decided (this was for me) pretty quickly, once I got going, because I just loved it so much,” he said.
It’s the same year he got his start with the Intercounty Baseball League’s London Majors, and has been calling baseball games every summer since.
Last year, he joined 519 Sports Online and began travelling around to GOJHL rinks to call games. 
Baker is also bilingual, and has utilized that skill as the French public address voice at the last two Memorial Cups. He also provided the French play-by-play at the U SPORTS women’s national hockey championship last spring.
“I’ve had my fair share of great hockey moments over the years, and I’ve been very lucky,” he said.
Baker is calling games both at home and on the road, and said he will likely miss one or two games because of exams.
He is in the third year of a four-year sport media program at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“It’s definitely going to be busy to balance it all, but when an opportunity like this presents itself, you can’t pass it up,” he said. “You have to jump all over it.”

I’ve seen some of his 519 Sports work and found it to be pretty solid. For a while it’ll be really friggin weird hearing someone who isn’t Larry when I tune in, but I think he’ll do just fine.

Go Storm!

Trump Gets Another Wish As Jimmy Kimmel Is Pulled Off the Air For no Good Reason. Enjoy Your Dictatorship, America

ABC Pulls Jimmy Kimmel Live! Over Kirk Killer Remarks
If anything I’m about to say sounds dramatic to you, too bad. Because moments like these are how democracies die.

When the powerful chill speech, people stop speaking. When no one speaks, no one is holding the powerful accountable. When no one is holding the powerful accountable, the powerful take more and more. It doesn’t happen all at once, but one day, the people wake up in a place they don’t recognize, one that looks an awful lot like Russia or China or North Korea or any of the others that Trump has praised. Places where there is no speech unless it’s government approved. Where there are no elections unless it’s already clear who’s going to win with a resounding 112% of the vote.

This is a pattern, one that’s been years in the making. Trump has spent a decade attacking and threatening the media and his critics at every opportunity. He does it in his speeches, in his press conferences, in his interviews, in his writings, in the courts, and with his political appointments. He’s done it so much that a lot of us are numb to it, and that’s the point. If they stop paying attention, the reasoning goes, they won’t notice that they don’t like what we’re doing.

The saddest part is how easy it’s looked, and how willingly anyone with resources has been to bend the knee.

You won’t approve our merger? Yes sir, we’ll get rid of the mean comedian.

You’re going to tie us up in the courts and cost us money we totally can afford over completely fair and reasonable news coverage? Ok sir, here’s an eight figure settlement.

Every one of these capitulations sells out the country a little more, and it’s never going to be enough. there will always be another demand. They’ll take and take and take until there’s nothing worth taking, and then take that too just to make sure you know who’s boss.

And no matter what anyone says, none of this Kimmel business has a damn thing to do with Charlie Kirk, at least not to anyone who counts. He’s just the convenient opening that Trump needed to do something he’s wanted to do for years. When Colbert got axed, he said Kimmel was next. Now that we may never see Kimmel again, he’s already calling for Fallon, Meyers, and even the damn View before the corpse has even had a chance to cool off.

It sure would be nice if someone would stand up and say no more before there’s no more to stand up for.

Kimmel had been the subject of mounting criticism in right-wing media over the last 48 hours. Earlier this afternoon FCC Chair Brendan Carr suggested in an interview that Kimmel could face sanctions from the FCC for his comments.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on Benny Johnson’s Benny Show podcast Wednesday afternoon. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel—or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr, a close ally of President Trump, suggested that Disney, ABC’s parent company, should address Kimmel’s comments before the FCC gets involved, suggesting Kimmel could be suspended. “You could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this,” Carr said.
He went on to urge local network affiliates for ABC and NBC to take action against the networks.
“Frankly I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney, and say, ‘We are going to preempt—we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out,’” Carr said. “It’s time for them to step up and say this garbage—to the extent that that’s what comes down the pipe in the future—isn’t something that serves the needs of our local communities.”