There Is Nothing Freak About This Accident


They’re making a big deal here out of the fact that these two women were deaf and that’s likely why this happened, but personally I feel like the standing on train tracks taking pictures and not paying attention thing might have had more to do with it. Your ears may not work, but as long as your eyes and your brain do, you should know better. If the answer to the one question you must ask yourself at a time like this is no, I am not a train, then you should not be finding yourself on the tracks for a moment longer than necessary.

Members of Montreal’s deaf community are in shock and saddened after two women were struck and killed by a train in Portugal.
Guylaine Boulanger, 62, and Elise Bénard, 66, are hearing impaired and were taking pictures near a river on Saturday near Baqueiros station in Mesao Frio, about 80 kilometres east of Porto.
The Portugal Resident reported that the train conductor blew his horn when he saw the two women on the tracks and applied the brakes, but was unable to stop in time.
The report adds that the two women were with two others, who were not injured, and were taking photos when they were hit.

The Ontario Liberals Have No Idea What They’re Doing, Do They?


I don’t have strong feelings one way or another about Bonnie Crombie, which I suppose may be part of the problem here. But the news that she’s resigning has me surprised and disappointed, because it really doesn’t feel like she was given a fair shot.

She hadn’t even been on the job for a full two years, and the one election campaign she did get to run was one called years earlier than it should have been. that was done, in part, to throw her off balance before she had a chance to get her feet under her. It was also one that, if we’re being honest with ourselves, she had zero chance of winning, because nobody had a reasonable prospect of beating Doug Ford. That the Liberals managed to gain seats was itself a pretty big accomplishment, even if none of those seats went to her. There was at least some upward momentum, which is the best you can hope for when you’re the third party in a majority house.

So with that in mind, I have no idea what the Liberals are hoping to achieve by nudging her toward the exit. They appear to be spinning it as a much needed reset and an opportunity for renewal, but that’s not what it looks like. From where I sit, it looks like desperate flailing, and entirely unnecessary desperate flailing at that. If you want to punch yourself in the dick for no damn reason then have at it, but I’m not sure why you would want to do that. If the goal is to get back on track and eventually topple the Conservatives, instability like this at the top is not going to help. The party would be much better off getting Crombie out in front of people so that everyone outside of Mississauga can get to know who she is. Tour the province. Talk policy whenever you can. Be on people’s radar so that when the next election comes around, those people might think voting Liberal is a worthwhile thing to do.

I mentioned earlier that the Liberals are looking at this as a reset. I think we need to talk more about that.

Noah Parker, an organizer with a group of Liberals who had been urging a leadership race, said while Crombie did a lot of great work for the party, he is looking forward to working on electing a new leader.
“Just look at what happened with our federal Liberals, and the complete excitement and new flurry of fundraising and donors, and of course, the complete 180 of the electoral prospects of that party as a result of a leadership contest,” said Parker, who was also one of several Liberals elected Sunday to the party’s executive council.

Yikes. Talk about a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually happened there.

Yes, a new leader was necessary in that case. Fair or not, the public distaste for Justin Trudeau was such that he was dead on arrival. Had he stayed on, Pierre Poilievre would almost certainly be Prime Minister of Canada right now. But the Liberals fortunes didn’t change just because they were all like “Hey look everyone, we got a new guy!” The only reason, and I do stress the *only* reason that the Liberals are still in power is Donald Trump getting elected again and immediately threatening our economy and sovereignty. To our credit, we the voting public decided at that point that it might be best if we had someone with actual credentials in charge rather than creepy Temu Trump, so that’s what we did. The Liberals just happened to luck into the right person at the right time. Had America voted responsibly last November, there’s a pretty good chance that Mark Carney would have lost, credentials be damned.

What that was was a moment in time. There was a sense of urgency and immediacy that called for a course correction. Unless I’m missing something huge, I have no sense that anything like that exists around Ontario’s Liberals right now.

And so I ask again, why set yourselves adrift when there’s no course to correct?

I’m Gonna Beat You Blind, Brother! Then I’m Gonna Do It To Myself!

I’m still very behind on watching wrestling. I’m not sure I’ll ever catch up, but that’s ok. Pretty much everything I watch these days is good to great, so at least I’m having fun trying.

Anywho, I just got to the point in late May where Fraxiom got their new, main roster entrance music. Like most of the WWE themes now, it’s not really very good. But on the bright side, the words made me pay attention for a minute. At least what I thought were the words, I should say.

Convince me that the man singing these lyrics from a song that sounds like a 90s cartoon and a turn of the century new metal band had a baby isn’t saying “whackin’ off to the maximum”. Go on, try. Because even after reading that the line is supposedly “Rackin’ ’em to the maximum” and then subjecting myself to the entire thing to confirm, I remain unconvinced.

WWE does a lot of things right these days, but music is one area that needs some serious improvement. Every musical change is somehow for the worse, even if where they started was already sort of garbage. Old man yelling at clouds here, but remember when you’d watch a Royal Rumble and whenever the next person’s music hit you would instantly know who it was? Good luck with that now. I like to think I’m pretty good at name that tune, but WWE has pretty well nondescripted me to death.

The Make-A-Wish President

When you watch the way Trump’s officials talk about him, it’s hard to come away from the experience thinking anything other than that it’s some of the most pathetic nard gargling you’ve ever had the misfortune of witnessing. But I suppose if you’re worried that dear leader might have you disappeared or that you may suddenly get a case of the clumsies and fall out a window should you dare question his god-like abilities, you’ll do what you must to keep yourself in whatever passes for his good graces for as long as you can at the expense of your country. Why people are so drawn to and scared of this fucking goof will forever be a mystery to me, but for now, that’s where we are.

but what if the rumours are true? What if Trump really is in even worse health than it appears and he might not be long for this world? What if, rather than the wannabe dictator he plays on television, he’s actually just the world’s crappiest Make-A-Wish kid?

Whichever side of that coin turns out to be the right one, can we please just end this?

How They Get Records To Play Stereo Sound

When I took audio production classes back in high school or when things needed to be done for the radio station, the subject of records didn’t come up all that much. At that time, everything was all about tape, CD and the beginnings of digital. Nobody was really worried about getting something pressed onto vinyl. And so it came to be that although I listened to my fair share of records as a child, I had no idea how the things actually worked. I knew the basics of needles and grooves and whatever, but how they managed stereo sound when there was only the one groove rather than the dedicated channels like everything else has was always a mystery. …Until now. This is fascinating if you’re into this kind of stuff, and perhaps even if you aren’t.

No Scrubs, the Acoustic Ballad

I’m not going to pretend I know anything about Matt Corby beyond whatever’s on his website, but I most definitely enjoyed his cover of TLC’s “No Scrubs”, because as we should all know by now, I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.

This was done for a segment on Australian radio station Triple J called “Like A Version”, a name I can also appreciate.

Watch A Bunch Of Fake Ads From Saturday Night Live

There’s no doubt that Saturday Night Live is one of the greatest, most important comedy shows of all time, even if sometimes it leaves me sitting in front of the TV completely confused or muttering to myself about how something or other is the worst shit I’ve ever seen. But I suppose that’s one of the reasons it’s stuck around for so long. Humour is subjective, and SNL, most of the time, manages to have a little something for everyone. If I’m bored to tears one minute, the next I might see something that will have me talking about vans down by the river for the rest of my damn life.

That hardly makes me unique. I’m Pretty sure everyone I know has a similar relationship with the show. They have their favourite eras and everything else sucks ass. It’s been that way for 50 years, and I hope it never changes even though television as we know it is eventually going to die.

There are two aspects of SNL that I’ve always enjoyed no matter which decade I’m watching. Weekend Update and the fake commercials. So I’ve been having a good time with this Rolling Stone list of their 50 favourite parody ads. A lot of the classics are here. Bass-o-matic, Swill, Happy Fun Ball, Shimmer Floor Wax, and there are also some I’ve never seen, like this one for Almost Pizza.

Or Wade Blasingame, dog suing attorney.

And Chickham Apple Farm, which even features someone briefly breaking character.

While we’re at it, they also did a list of the 50 best characters. It’s pretty fun too. What was that about a van down by the river?

By the way, if you’re using a screen reader, press enter on the photos at the start of each item in the commercials list if you want to watch the video. It’ll turn it into a YouTube player that will start automatically. Only downside is you’ll have to skip an ad or two each time, which sucks if you’re like me and pay for YouTube without the ads.

In These Unprecedented Times, You Can Count On Us To Tell The Truth About Our Crummy User Experience. That’s Why We Need Your Support Now More Than Ever

They say that the best jokes often start out with a grain of truth. If that’s true, then this one makes me feel like I’ve just been run over by a truck full of them.

Speaking of which, if I get asked to sign into a random website with my Google account one more time…

Oh, and now also feels like a good time to revisit this, which I’m sad to say has not gotten any better in spite of my considerable influence. Hey, don’t laugh. It took a while, but Patreon did eventually listen to me.

I Need A Babysitter. For Myself, Judging By The Kinds Of Things I Get Tricked Into

My brain has been through a lot these last couple weeks (more on that sometime down the road I’m sure), but I still have no idea why this particular scam worked. Maybe you can pull it once because there’s someone out there that’ll fall for anything, but multiple times? Nothing about it makes any sense.

According to investigators, between October 2024 and August 2025, a man posing as a babysitter named “Ashley Turnbull” was hired for a number of babysitting jobs. They did not disclose how many jobs he was hired for.
Police allege the man would send cheques to the victims and ask them to deposit the funds into their accounts. He would then request that they transfer the money from the cheque back to the accused, so the funds could be used for supplies and material needed to babysit.

“When the cheques were deposited into the victims’ accounts and transferred, often days later, they learned the cheques were fraudulent,” police said in a news release issued Wednesday.
The money was never recovered, police said.

Forget babysitting, which I’ve done without requiring such a convoluted process or even much of a process at all, but this just is not how literally anything ever works. The tiniest bit of thought and the whole thing falls apart.

If supplies are needed, you buy them and then figure it into what you charge the customer when the job is done, or the customer provides them and you do the job. Those are your choices. No matter which one you choose, if everyone is on the level, then someone is using his own money from one of his own accounts to accomplish the goal. This would, assuming that common sense is our guide, mean that if you have cheques to deposit, you would go ahead and deposit those on your own. You would definitely not go to the trouble of writing a cheque to your customer, because that makes no sense. You have the money, go buy the stuff. No need for the weird extra steps that do nothing but inconvenience everyone involved. And if you did for some reason want to write a cheque to your customer, then why in the world would your customer ever agree to cash it and send the money back to you unless your customer is a dunderhead, because that’s sketchy as all hell if you bother to use five seconds of thinking power. You can’t even blame desperation on the client side here, because if you have time to wait for a cheque to come to your door, you have time to find a babysitter that isn’t a straight up crook.

I do hope that this Kim Manget fellow does some time and is forced to make restitution to the people he defrauded assuming he’s guilty, but I won’t lie. I don’t think it would hurt my feelings much if none of those people ever saw a dime. I know we aren’t supposed to blame victims, but now and then there are people who need a good victimizing so that they can perhaps make up for the practical critical thinking skills they clearly missed out on as children when the rest of us learned them.