It’s been a while since I posted one of these.

An article on the CBC about an 18-year old kid caught doing 308 km/hr in a 100 zone.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/burlington-qew-stunt-driving-308-1.5564486

This was one of the comments. I can’t even…

Reuben Danko 8 minutes ago
Nothing wrong with speeding as long as one know how to handle a vehicle at that speed , what is dangerous is those who can not handle a vehicle within or below the ridicule speed limits. It is quite feasible to drive on a 3 lane hiwghay at 140 Km/H to 16 Km/h, the Europeans do, with narrower lanes, and have less accidents than drivers in the US and CAN, because they know how to drive,m most drive 5 speeds, not that girl sort of nonsense of automatic (works to sell cars and place more inept behind the wheel, mostly women and mentally slow men). Driving needs to be reserved for those who can handle a foot cluctch, 5-6 sped manual on a rear wheel traction, try texting, put on make up (CAN and US women are known to do dirty things to) eat (that is something utterly abhorrent eat in a car). In life there are drivers and there are commuters, most CAN and US are commuters, and they proved it, more safety toolls in cars today than ever and the number of accidents and dead has not dropped significantly.

It was deleted about 30 minutes later (thank god). The number of people defending the kid blew me away (200 km/hr OVER people!) but this guy doubled down big time.

I can’t even begin to express all the subtitles that this headline brings to mind. Trump aides? WTF.

We are living in very strange times.

A comment seen on a recent CBC.ca story.

WK 10 hours ago

Love the story but the writing is terrible. I guess proof reading for errors has become a lost art or writers have become quite lazy. 
“”I’m looking for looking for its parents and it doesn’t take very long before I’m looking directly eyeball to eyeball to one of them,” he said. “

I haven’t done a Stupid Human Tricks post for a while, but this one really made me cringe. Context: it was a discussion about whether or not politics should be allowed/tolerated on a sailing forum (the rules say no). Discussion was moving along tolerably well until someone came up with this first bit of non-factual “facts.”

this is not about politics this is a FACT America is the ONLY free country in the world because Americans can buy guns. so if American freedom bothers you all I have to say is God bless you and Merry Christmas.

http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f129/politics-or-not-please-216054-7.html

Clearly not part of the topic discussion. This then spawned the second comment which I am giving an A+ rating on the stupid scale. I mean, you don’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to know this wasn’t going to take the conversation anywhere good. But then again, maybe my politics are showing. Still, less than a page later the thread was closed by Mods because it had gone off the rails.

I’m a recent British refugee, now American citizen ~15 yrs or so. I suspect much of the recent political furor may be due to us electing the most brilliant leader the world has ever seen. I sense that much of the rest of the world is very envious, or hopelessly mental.

http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f129/politics-or-not-please-216054-8.html

There was a recent, almost playful, discussion on one of the sailing forums the other day about the potential northward invasion of our American neighbours. It devolved —just a bit — into finger pointing for a while and I chimed in with a few thoughts. But I thought I would (re)record them here for my future self in case I ever get overly frustrated with the universe.

I’m not so left or so right that I think the system — or systems if we are speaking generically of Western world politics — is in any danger; they’ve been designed to weather the storms of a redneck America or a socialist Alberta. It’s the ignorance and inherent laziness of people that scares me; While I welcome Americans who want to try a lifestyle that includes 40° below (celsius or fahrenheit) as a normal fact-of-life, I truly believe they need to stay the course, educate themselves and fight for their own values. whatever they are.

We all just need to get our heads out of our asses and work: to build consensus, educate ourselves and our neighbours, and put our brains to work, rather than hiding behind simplistic ideas of “right” and “wrong.” A quote out of a recent CBC article encapsulates the sort of dangerous “smug” assumptions voters make:

Despite what many smug Canadians would like to believe, there are those among us who, for example, worry about proper screening at the border, or about integration among new immigrants — there are even those who use the phrase “left-wing elite” non-ironically.
Anyone naive enough to believe we don’t have Trump-like people here in Canada is just as dangerous as someone who thinks a “Canadian Values Test” will keep out any but the most honest of applicants.

I don’t care if you are pro-gun or antigun, a rabid Rocna fan or a Delta devotee, just because you think everyone else is an idiot and should just bugger off doesn’t mean that it’s ever going to happen. And frankly that belief is more destructive than a hundred Trumps.
…

But weren’t we talking about American beer?

In the category of Clear Insights into Human Behaviour:

Cartwright believes education, not enforcement, is the way to make snowmobiling safer, although it’s unlikely education campaigns will reach everyone, especially that segment of sledders liable to crush their own friends.

From the CBC article on snowmobile safety

This is who I aspire to be. regina-man-goes-to-extreme-lengths-to-answer-online-comments. Of course I would title it Guy Gets Shit Done after Being Irritated By People Bitching So Much or maybe Just Do it For F*ck’s Sake or even Regina Man Does Something Sensible: Internet Astounded!

McDonald said the main reason he dug out a stranger’s car was to get people thinking about issues he deems more important.

“I wanted people to stop filling the City of Regina’s Facebook page with posts about snow so that we can all go back to the important things like arguing online about the terrible funding model they decided on for the new stadium,” he said.

Like Mssr McDonald I am (and always have been) a sucker for for reading comments and opinions, rarely with much satisfaction. Way back as a kid I would faithfully read the back page of Alberta Report where Mr Ted Byfield (and later his son Link) would vomit out line upon line of bilious diatribe and then I would swear and curse for 15 minutes before my mother would once again tsk-tsk me and tell me to just not read them. (Actually she always espoused the belief that Ted was just trying to get my goat—and succeeding. I never believed it.)

So anyway, this guy did something about it. F*cking Ay. Damn internet Comment-jockies. But it speaks volumes about our society that the media decided he went to “extreme” lengths. It was probably a 10 minute job to find the car and then he shovelled it. The shovelling was the whole point. And a 10 minute internet search better not be considered extreme these days or I will find myself on some Dr. Phil show someday.

But ya people; just shovel the driveway. Your driveway, her driveway, the fricking Mayor’s driveway. It’s more energy efficient than bitching about it.

So the other day I went to Staples to print out some cover proofs in colour. The cover measures 9.5 x 10.75 so it won’t fit full size on 8.5 x 11 sheet. So I picked tabloid on the colour printer and choked the machine. Stupid colour copiers. The machine of course, charged me almost $4 for the 4 copies I didn’t get. But the nice lady at the counter happily took my USB stick and set up the job to send to her behind-the-counter printer and all seemed well.

Just as she sent it, she mentioned there would be white space at the top and bottom and was that ok. I said sure, the cover was only 9 x 10 and there would be whitespace all around. At this, she screwed up her face and cancelled the print job. While she reset the print parameters, she told me that the reason the other copier had choked was because I was trying to print a file that was the wrong size. The next time I had an odd size I should just come to the counter and for a $3 service fee she would “fix” my file. Because the  software they used automatically expanded the image to fit the paper size. And they had to tell it not to do that.

So to summarize, she (Staples) would charge me $3 ($2 if it was not a rush job) to print out my file at the size my file was. It was ‘free’ to blow it up to a bigger size, but would cost me almost double if I wanted it just the way I supplied it.

Kill me now…

A rejected version of the cover