Matt of All Trades blog, like the title suggests, is by a Vermont author and offers offbeat musings on pop culture, media, journalism, humor, weirdness, stupid people, smart people, my life as a journalist, landscaper, photographer, married gay man, dog lover and weather geek and more. It's run by me, Matt Sutkoski, a native Vermonter living in St. Albans, Vt.
Police said this women was driving to her wedding but was drunk behind the wheel.
At most weddings I've been to, there's been a fair amount of drinking. Which is great, because it's a celebration! I'll drink to that!
Like most people on their wedding day, both my husband Jeff and I were stone cold sober, each surely with a blood alcohol content of 0.0 percent before and during our vows nearly six years ago.
I can't guarantee the same for later that day, during the post-wedding celebration.
You want to - pardon the pun - drink in the moment of your vows, and it's easiest to do that while sober.
A bride in Arizona didn't think so. She was drunk before the wedding, which led to a highly embarrasing and dangerous situation:
Police said she was drunk behind the wheel, and in March caused a crash that sent one person to the hospital with what thankfully turned out to be minor injuries.
Though police said she was on her way to her wedding, and told them that at the scene of the crash. However, the woman, Amber Young, 32, said later that she was not on her way to her wedding that day and was wearing a sundress as she drove to meet a friend for lunch.
You be the judge.
Her attorney said police posted the photo, not as a warning against drunk driving, but to mock Young.
In any event, don't drink and drive, whether you're going to your wedding, or just ready to have lunch.
Jordan Peele literally put words in Barack Obama's mouth using technology that would make today's fake news seem like kid's play
A PSA recently came out that features former President Barack Obama, but it's almost immediately apparent that something is off when you start watching it.
His voice sounds a little weird. Like he's been drinking (Obama has absolutely no reputation as a drinker.)
The things he says are even more off kilter.
Here's part of the script:
"We're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time - even if they would never say those things......So, for instance, they could have me say things like, I don't know, (Black Panther's) Kilmonger was right! Or Ben Carson is in the sunken place! Or how 'bout this, Simply, President Trump is a total and complete dipshit."
We all know Obama would never say things like publicly. But in the video, his lips are moving perfectly with the words being spoken. How could this be.
It turns out "Obama" is being voiced by filmmaker and actor Jordan Peele. (One of Peele's schticks is impersonations of Obama.)
As BuzzFeed reports,the PSA was a project developed by Peele and BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, who is Peele's brother in law.
The screen in the video splits, to show Peele delivering the PSA and Obama appearing to do it. It's amazing the technology makes it look like Obama is actually speaking. And scary, for sure.
The script continues: "This is a dangerous time. Moving forward, we need to be more vigilant with what we trust from the internet."
"A slew of slick, easy-to-use and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality, for which terms have already been coined - 'reality apathy,' 'automated laser phishing' and 'human puppets."
Buzzfeed goes on: "Such tools could be used to create pornographic videos with celebrities' faces superimposed or have world leaders appear to make outrageous and potentially dangerous statements. "
I have to admit: Donald Trump has a point. There's a lot of fake news out there. It's just that most of what he calls fake is true, and some of what he calls true is fake.
That's the crux of the problem: Who do we believe? And what do we do about people who absolutely believe things that aren't true, because fake news can be so convincing?
The point Peele is illustrating just points to how much worse things are going to get with technology. How are we going to trust what we see and hear? Even legitimate news sites will have trouble discerning what is real and what is fake.
Plus, let's face it. Most people believe things that fit their already set viewpoint. And many are willing to go over the top with their beliefs.
There's still a lot of people out there convinced that "Pizzagate" is real, that Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of the basement of a Washington DC pizzaria, never mind that said pizza place doesn't even have a basement.
There's an amazing number of people out there who think the Earth is flat, that jet contrails are really "chemtrails" raining chemicals down on us to control our minds, that surviving students of the February mass shooting in Florida are just "crisis actors" trying to take all our rights away.
When this becomes widespread, when videos will literally put words in other peoples' mouths, this conspiracy theory, fake news believing group will become bigger and bigger.
And real world problems won't get solved because everyone will be chasing fake world problems.
Technology can be a force of good. But more and more often, it's being weaponized. Mostly for psych ops. That's not the future I want.
Tractor trailer trucks park beneath a bridge long I-696 in Detroit to
prevent a suicidal man from getting hurt if he jumped off the bridge.
A guy in Detroit this week was going to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge and onto busy I-696.
Police were called to try to negotiate with the guy to make him change his mind. That part of the story is unfortunately common. Happens all the time.
But the part of this story I - and pretty much the rest of social media and the public in general likes - is another way police and semi-truck drivers cooperated to prevent the suicide.
The cops closed the highway to traffic, except for 13 semi-truck drivers, who they let through. The catch was, the 13 truck drivers would park cheek-by-jowl under the bridge. If the guy did jump, he'd land on the roof of one of the trucks, which were only a few feet below the bridge. If the guy jumped, he probably wouldn't have even gotten hurt.
After a few hours, the suicidal guy agreed to give up and go to the hospital for an evaluation.
NPR's Carl Kasell (on piano) was a serious journalist, and a
boffo quiz show judge and voice mail provider
Carl Kasell, the longtime news reader for NPR, died last week at the age of 84.
Upon his retirement from NPR, he got a stint as the funny scorekeeper, judge and prize provider for "Wait Wait....Don't Tell Me!"the humorous NPR news quiz show.
As Morning Edition anchor before his retirement, Kasell was super serious, but "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" was his chance to be the comedian for once.
"Host Peter Sagal says no one could have guessed that Kasell would be so funny. 'The greatest thing about Carl was anything we came up with, he was game,' Sagal says. 'When we were in Las Vegas, we had him come onstage in a showgirl's headdress. No matter what we asked him to do - silly voices, or weird stunts; we had him jump out of a cake once to make his entrance onstage - he did it (with) such joy and dignity."
"Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me," didn't have a budget for prizes to be given to winning contestants, so Kasell just did voice mails for the winners. They were terrific.
Marc Spellman on "Britain's Got Talent" seemed low key, but......
As anyone who reads this blog thingy knows, I am a fan of those "reality" talent shows in which people sing, dance, do magic, do something weird for fame and fortune.
This season's "Britain's Got Talent" has started, and the first coveted "Golden Buzzer" has been bestowed. Deservedly.
The Golden Buzzer is given to contestants who wow the judges durin their auditions. It forwards the contestants on to later shows, without having to compete with earlier hoi polloi and earlier rounds.
This Golden Buzzer contestant is a magician names Marc Spellman. Be patient with the clip, because frankly, this guy starts out a little sluggish and low key, and you wonder what the hell he's trying to do.
A still from that Sinclair News Group "hostage video" in which anchors
at local television stations were ordered to read a pro-Trump fake news
script to their viewers.
I'm sure many of you have heard the hue and cry about Sinclair.... the parent company of lot of local television stations who forced all those local anchors to parrot Donald Trump's "fake news" talking points. (read: lies.)
You can see this video for yourself at the bottom of this post. I'll quote a key line from the video.
"Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control 'exactly what people think'.......This is extremely dangerous to a democracy."
So instead, the Sinclair Trumpian overlords used their corporate platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control what the people think - which is extremely dangerous to a democracy.
But, whatever.
Sinclair owns 193 local television stations and is looking to buy many more, apparently in an effort to sell their right wing bullshit at the expense of accurate local news. And since there are often no local alternatives for viewers, Sinclair believes they can brainwah the viewing public.
Besides all this awful stuff, Sinclair sounds like a terrible, terrible, place to work.
First of all, most journalists, certainly including local television journalists, pride themselves on accurate, hard-hitting reporting that is unbiased as humanly possible.
I was in journalism for year. I get it. We all have our biases, opinions and slants. We're human beings after all. But from Journalism 101 and on through my 20-year career as a reporter, it was always ingrained in me to follow the fact where they led, question everything, be skeptical and do everything I could to purge my internal biases from my reporting.
"For many of us, that was the death knell. The perception among much of the public was that Sinlar was Trump TV. Now it felt like that perception was a reality. Had Trump's seal of approval put is in the same camp as Infowars and Fox News? This was a place many Sinclair journalists never expected, or wanted to be in. A station we've cared about for many years has been stripped of its credibility. The station lost longtime viewers - and respect from the community, its most important asset. And we Sinclair employees have lost respect for our jobs."
So why don't these Sinclair journalists just quit and find work somewhere else?
The answer gets into why Sinclair is such an evil company for employees. The anonymous Sinclair journalists writing for Vox were anonymous knew that if their names became public, Sinclair would fire them, and worse, make them pay back the corporation thousands of dollars.
That's right.
Various versions of Sinclair employee contracts leaked to the media show that employees who quit the company might be subject to "liquidated damages" which would make them pay Sinclair up to 40 percent of their annual paycheck as penalty.
Now, most television stations, and many companies in general have a non-compete clause. You'd be restricted from working for a direct competitor, and if you do, your former company can demand money.
But some Sinclair employees, like Jonathan Beaton, quit his job at Sinclair-owned WPEC and took a new job by starting up a public relations firm, which is not in competition with Sinclair or WPEC.
As the Daily Beastand other news outlets point out, this Sinclair contract could well be iffy from a legal standpoint.
"This liquidated damages clause seems highly problematic......In general, such clauses are not enforceable if they are simply punitive; they have to be reasonable attempts to capture likely damages. In the employment contact, this is very unusual," Samuel Estreicher of the Center for Employment Law and New York University told the Daily Beast.
Former Sinclair employees could then conceivably fight the company in court, but most don't want to invest money and time they don't have for a legal fight. That's why the anchors in the above-mentioned Vox article want to remain anonymous.
First of all Beaton tells us why he quit the Sinclair owned station:
"As reporters and anchors at the company, we were routinely told to follow leads and angles with a clear-cut conservative agenda. At CBS-12, (WEPC) I was ordered to do man-on-the-street interviews that were clearly politically biased. I'd ask loaded questions like, 'How much do you disagree with Obama this year?' It was disguised as real journalism. The funny thing is, I'm a Republican - and I was still pissed by it. But it was more than just the questions. It was stories we were told to do. They often had to have a religious tie-in. We couldn't do stories, for the most part, that involved the LGBTQ community. There were a set of parameters and we had to stick to them."
So much for Sinclair's anchor hostage tape supposedly decrying fake or biased news, huh?
You'd think a corporation making a profit of $443.5 million in its latest quarterly earnings wouldn't spend a lot of time and litigation trying to get $5,700. But you'd be wrong.
"Sinclair argues that I caused them irreparable harm by leaving. Believe me, I was a good reporter, but not that good," Beaton says.
Of course, there's a larger goal here on the part of Sinclair. Make an example out of Beaton and nobody else will quit. But as Beaton puts it, "I refuse to cower and acquiesce to this malevolent corporation. I'm fighting back."
Good. I'm glad to see some rebellions starting againt Sinclair. If anything good came out of the "hostage video," it's the attention it brought.
Fourteen journalism schools have come out critcizing Sinclair. Budding journalists have been put on notice not to apply for jobs at Sinclair because if they do, they'll face a career of misery. Which means, by attrition, Sinclair will lose its remaining crop of good journalists, and just complete its transformation into an untrustworthy shill for the Trumpians of the world.
And then we can all go on ignoring the blah, blah, blah noise of the Sinclair Trump hornblowers. Buh-bye!
In case you forgot it, here's that "hostage video."
The remains of a Turkish mansion after an out of control ship hit it in the Bosphorus Straight.
Sometimes, things just don't go right during a day on the job.
Lately, quite a few people have had that happen in a huge way.
A lot of what you are about to see look like at least potentially fireable offenses. So keep checking out this post every time you make a mistake at work.
It could always be worse.
First, we go to Denmark, where it was time to demolish an old silo. It was all set up. The giant silo would come down, and tilt to the right and crash into an open lot.
Bummer. The damn thing tilted to the left. Where, of course, there was a building in the way. Part of the silo landed on a library and cultural center.While that building was badly damaged, most of the books inside were saved, even though they were covered in dust.
Watch:
Next, we go to the Bophorus Straight near Instabul, Turkey, where, unfortunatly, a ship's rudder recently failed.
Not after the ship hit it. It was quite an impact, as you can see from the video below. Luckily no injuries were reported
Now we go to our nice close neighbors in Montreal, where, on an icy day in early April, the cargo hold of a truck lifted up as it sped along Highway 40. Nobody is sure why yet, but it sure led to a dramatic crash into a pedestrian bridge
The load of corn went everywhere, and a motorist nearby filmed the whole thing.
Strang truck mishaps seem to be an epidemic. A truck loaded with empty beer kegs plunged off a Pennsylvania overpass recently, spilling the kegs all over Interstate 95and forcing a temporary closure of one of the world's busiest highways.
Then there's the famous 11 foot, eight inch bridgein North Carolina, which continues to claim the lives of many trucks which are too tall for the low overpass. Despite numerous safety measures and warnings that have been installed there over the years, trucks continue to hit the railroad bridge.
Yeah, people are stupid.
Here's the Montreal crash
Finally, this is what happens when a car stalls out on a California freeway. This video was taken a couple months back.Yikes!
Trainloads of human poop are rotting in an Alabama rail yard, and nobody
seems interested in moving it away from people.
Train loads of poop - shit, crap, whatever you want to call it - 10 million pounds of it - are sitting in a railyard in Parrish, Alabama.
The fine 982 residents of Parrish are not happy about this. You can imagine why.
The whole situation just goes to show you what happens when a small town, or a person, or a business without a lot of money and without regulations in place can become the victim of aloof businesses, and neighboring communities that have more resources.
The crap has been sitting there for two months, and smells like rotting animal carcasses. By the way, this is mostly human crap. Not produced by the people of Parrish, but by residents of New York and New Jersey.
Summer is rapidly approaching Alabama. When it gets hot the extreme stench will only get worse.
Apparently, nobody gives a, um, shit about this except the people in Parrish.
The companies that handle this call the shit biowaste, I guess to make it sound better, but it's shit. For the past year, waste management facilities in New York and New Jersey have been shipping tons of this crap to Big Sky Environmental, a private landfill in Adamsville, Alabama.
The town of West Jefferson, right near Adamsville, filed an injunction to keep this sludge from being stored in a nearby rail yard. So, Big Sky decided to park it in Parrish.
Obviously, Parrish doesn't like this, as noted above, but they don't have many resources. Big Sky is "solving" the problem by not returning phone calls from the mayor of Parrish, or local news media outlets, or CNN for that matter.
The crap in Parrish was parked there because it was already in transit when West Jefferson got the injunction. But couldn't Big Sky send it back where it came from. Not literally, because you can't insert it back into people, but maybe store it where nobody lives?
Parrish Mayor Heather Hall says she's trying to get the shit train out of town. Hall said Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and other lawmakers are trying to sort it out, but so far, no luck.
The smell from the train is permeating the town. "It greatly reduces the quality of life. You can't sit out on your porch. Kids can't go outside and play and God help us if it gets hot and this material is still out there," Hall said.
Officials are telling the town's residents that this isn't a health hazard, but come on! If it smells that bad, and people are breathing it, it can't be good.
And it's warming up down there. Temperatures around Parrish are supposed to be around 80 degrees on Friday.
A smelly sewage problem developed in Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles
during an exhibition game this week.
Baseball games are called for all sorts of reasons: Rain, lightning, hail. Even snow!
But this is a new one. Sewage forced the premature end of an exhibition game at Dodgers Stadium last week.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the sewage mishap killed the exhibition game between the Dodgers and Angels in the fifth inning on Tuesday.
The LA Times says the Dodgers have not exactly said what was spilled, but we do know it was brown and smelly and didn't seem to want to stop gurgling out.
I totally feel sorry for the groundskeepers who had to try to contain the icky brown flood.
Dodgers Pitcher Ross Stripling had this little editorial comment about the situation.
"Crappy way to end the spring.... Get it?"
Unfortunately, yeah, we get it.
We're told the problem has been fixed and we can get on with Major League Baseball season in Los Angeles.
Frank Amedia says he miraculously resurrected an ant. You gotta start somewhere.
In this here blog thingy, I always love to quote some of the more, shall we say, colorful, evangelical right wingers who, I must admit are incredibly creative with their stories.
I've got a couple more, and let's start with the best one, which I think tops anything I've seen so far.
DEMONIC INSECTS
According to Right Wing Watch,Frank Amedia, who served as a volunteer "Christian policy liaison" for Donald Trump's presidential campaign, says he resurrected an ant back to life.
OK, OK, bringing an ant back to life isn't exactly the same as the Resurrection of Jesus, but you have to start somewhere.
Amedia begins his story: "This was the most incredible one." When you read on, you'll realize you can't argue with him.
On a recent trip to Israel, he was bitten on the leg by an ant while praying (of course!) and he instinctively swatted it before crushing it into pieces with his thumb.
OK, a little mean, but I would have done the same thing. Here's where it goes off the rails:
"All of a sudden, the Holy Spirit speaks to me so clearly. It was as clear as I have ever heard....It was the voice of the Father. The Father calls me son, an dthe Father said, 'Son, look at the ant......And the Lord said to me, 'Son, I hear the cry of an ant.'"
It's nice to know that the Lord loves all creatures, great and small, including ants, so it's good that the Lord heard the anguish of this poor ant.
Amedia continues: "I began to weep inside of me....And then the Lord said, 'Son, take your finger and touch the ant.'"
Or the little pieces of it, but whatever.
Anyway, Amedia, being obedient, did as the Lord instructed. And lo and behold!!!. Well, let's let Amedia tell us:
"The power of God shot out..and the ant, it came alive and the pieces all were together and it jumped up on my finger, came up slowly my palm, and stopped right there as if it was looking right at me.'"
The video of Amedia's tale, at the bottom of this post, is something to, um, behold, so it's worth the watch.
Amedia does have something of a fascination with insects. Back in November, 2016, Right Wing Watch tells ushe warned us about demonic hornets. I hate hornet stings, so I don't blame him for calling them demonic.
But Amedia went pretty far with his story.
He warned us that he saw hornets "dipping these stingers into a cesspool" that contained "a liquor, a potion, and the potion was filled with all the vile characteristics and the power of witchcraft and occult, of abortion and murder and selfishness and deceitfulness.... and they were being sent out to invade humanity, and, if you will, inject these potions."
I guess in other words, the hornets were drinking Bud Light and then stinging us to inject us with that awful piss water. That's my theory, anyway.
Amedia, as always, goes on: "And I saw that they (the hornets) were dipping their tails in that putrid muck that was coing up from Abaddon (whereever that is) and being sent out to sting, sting, with homosexuality........ "
The rest is the whole litany of other "sins" he hates.
Oh, so that's why I'm gay! My mother wasn't liberal enough with the bug spray, and as a child, I must have gotten stung by a demonic hornet and here I am today. Oh well, bummer.
GOD COMMANDS US ALL TO OWN AR-15S
There's a lot of controversy these days about AR-15s, the semi-automatic weapons that are the centerpiece of so many tragic mass shootings in our nation.
Chuck Baldwin says you're not a true Christian unless you own an AR-15
It turns out, AR-15s are pure and godly, and everybody in this Christian nation should own one, or at least something like one of these.
So says Chuck Baldwin, who, sadly, failed to win the presidency in 2008 as the Christian Reconstructionist Constitution Party's nominee. (Don't worry, I've never heard of this group, either.)
According to Right Wing Watch. (Again! I swear they're not making this stuff up) Baldwin informs us that any Christian that does not own the equivalent of an AR-15 "has denied the Christian faith" and is "worse than a heathen."
His proof is Bible passage 1 Timothy, Baldwin said that every adult has "a duty to provide for your family, but you cannot provide protection for your family without being equipped to do so."
OK.
I'm not a Bible expert, so I looked up 1 Timothy. Maybe I'm not a careful reader, but for the life of me, I could not find any reference to AR-15s in that Bible passage. I couldn't even find much there regarding protection of family. Oh, well.
