Toronto Mayor Has Best Excuse For Smoking Crack: Was In Drunken Stupor

A big shoutout this morning to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford for offering the best excuses for misbehavior.

Crack and booze: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford
LOVES to party. 

After months of allegations, you might have heard that he finally admitted that he smoked crack.  His excuse was precious: "I was in a drunken stupor."

Oh, that makes it OK, then.

Residents of most cities probably wouldn't like it if their mayor was in a "drunken stupor" but in Toronto, at least for Ford, the drunken stupor is a good thing, because it excuses him for the crack smoking.

Pretty much everybody in Toronto wants Ford to resign, because no city likes to have a laughing stock as mayor. But good ol' Ford says he's going to stay on and run for re-election in 2014. Hey, booze and crack is expensive, you need a job to pay for it all, right?

According to the Associated Press, the crack smoking isn't the only example of Fords, um, colorful behavior:

"Ford apologized over the weekend for excessive drinking. He said he should not have been "hammered" drunk in public when he appeared at a street festival in August, calling it "pure stupidity."

He also said he got "a little out of control" after St. Patrick's Day in 2012, when city hall security guards said they witnessed a "very intoxicated' Ford having trouble walking and swearing at aides.

The mayor has also been accused of making an obscene gesture from his car and texting while driving. In 2011, Ford angered the city's gay community by declining to attend Toronto's gay pride parade, breaking with tradition observed by three previous mayors.

Earlier this year, the mayor was fired from his cherished side-job as a volunteer high school football coach after he made disparaging remarks to a TV network about parents and their kids."

 I'm not sure sure Ford will win the 2014 election, but he does sound like the life of a frat party, no?

On the bright side, if you're looking for a job, head to Toronto and run for mayor. You don't even have to be qualified. If you don't stumble around in public in a drunken stupor, and are not a fan of crack cocaine, that's an improvement over Ford. 

Your lack of drunkenness and drug abuse might just get you elected. 

Meanwhile, In Russia....

Dashcam videos from Russia offer hours of strange entertainment on YouTube.

I'll give you a good one that popped up the past couple of days.

Here's the scene. You can hear two men talking as the speed down a country road in Russia. The driver loses control on a curve and, you'll see what happens.

As you can tell by the tone of voice, it's no big deal, really:




For those of you (almost everybody) who doesn't understand Russian, I found this translation of their conversation, once they landed in the river:

"Oh we float!
Where we go?
 I don't know, maybe to the shore.
Don't steer the wheel. It's useless."

 Eh, we get where we're going eventually, they seem to say. No big deal.

Your Tax Dollars At Work: You're Not Getting The Bargain You Think You Are at McDonald's, Walmart

I'm like the conservatives: If you're able to work you should at least try to find a job and well, work.   I don't want my tax dollars going to able bodied people so they can get food stamps and other benefits.

Worker demonstrate for higher wages
at McDonald's in New York recently  

Which is why I'm pissed off at outfits like McDonald's and Walmart.

Wuh, what?

It turns out there are a bunch of able bodied people out there collecting food stamps, Medicaid and such. These people are working, so you'd think they shouldn't get such benefits. But their wages are so low, they qualify.

So to some extent, our tax dollars are not propping up some lazy, shiftless would-be workers who should just get off their duff and well, work.  Our tax dollars are already going to already insanely rich corporate executivesso they can pay low wages and let the government, i.e. us taxpayers, foot the bill for the living expenses these workers can't meet on their low wages.

Bottom line: Your Big Mac or the so-called bargain you find at Walmart might be costing you more than you think.

 McDonald's actually advised a worker, Nancy Salgado, who couldn't get by on her fast food wages to apply for food stamps and Medicaid. 

The nation's minimum wage over the past decade or two hasn't kept up with inflation. Many employees at fast food joints and discount stores make minimum wage or just a little above that.

I'd love to find a way to figure out how much my Big Mac would cost if I factored in the money I'm paying for people's food stamps and such.

 To be fair, Salgado is an activist advocating for higher wages for fast food workers.  And it's true some employees of fast food places and discounters like Walmart are just teenagers or whatever trying to make an extra buck.

But still, why are we subsidizing the very, very rich owners of these outfits by using our tax dollars to let them pay employees low, low, wages. We clearly aren't getting the bargain they've advertised.

According to the National Employment Labor Project, McDonald's alone costs taxpayers $1.2 billion annually because employees need public assistance because their wages are so low.

Yes, I know this is a complicated issue. I'm no economist, so I'm not sure how a living wage for everyone would affect the overall economy.

But when something doesn't seem fair, like this situation, there really needs to be a fix. I'm certainly willing to pay a bit more for a Big Mac rather than pay for somebody's food stamps so a corporate executive can get even richer.

Here's an (edited) YouTube recording of Saldago's McDonald's call

Gay Marriage Skit Offers Evidence "Homophobic" South Not So Bad?

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart recently had a segment in which they sent two men posing as a gay couple to Mississippi and Alabama to see what the public's reaction would be.

A man in the foreground congratulations
two other men posing as a gay couple in
the Deep South  

The two states are regarded as the least likely to allow or even consider gay marriage anytime soon.

The stereotype is the states are populated by hopeless, right wing, evangelical, closed minded homophobes.

Yee-hah! Let the party begin with this skit.

Maybe some of the politicians in the Deep South are like that, but the Daily Show segment offers anecdotal evidence and hope the general public might be more accepting

The "gay" couple was sent to a carnival, a livestock show and a photo booth where they did the whole PDA thing. Nobody flinched and some passersby were nice to them.

Then,  the pair went to the iconic southern cliche restaurant Waffle House where one proposed to the other.

In each place, people either ignored them or gave them a round of applause.

The Daily Show skit played on southern stereotypes. The people in Alabama and Mississippi didn't.  At least the onces on the Daily Show.

I have no illusions.  Some of the people in the Jon Stewart skit maybe didn't like gay people, but they kept quiet to be polite.

And there are hateful people everywhere who at best detest gay people and at worst want to kill them.

Just ask the morons who physically attacked a straight guy in Omaha for the Cardinal Sin of defending another guy in drag.  Or the 30 or so people murdered each year in the United States in homophobic hate crimes.

Or the zillions of people who can still be fired or denied housing because they are gay.

But the anti-gay politicians and the right wing blowhards who are the loudest are just trying to scare up votes and money. They're Internet trolls without actually being on the Internet.

I'm beginning to thinnk most people might be pretty decent. So thanks to the Jon Stewart people for pointing that out.

Anyway, here's the Jon Stewart video::

You Won't Believe These Weird Tricks They Did With These 20th Century Historical Headlines.

These days it's all about clicks on a website. Everything, especially headlines is written in a style designed to make you click on to read when you're on line.

Of course, it sort of dumbs down what the subject matter is. You know, it's all listicles, and language that always seems to involve the words "weird tricks" or "the most heartbreaking" or "You won't believe."

I found a summary of headlines regarding major 20th century historical events as if they were written today, when ya gotta get those clicks

UPDATE: As you can see from the comments section of this post, I now know the source of this image. It's from xkcd.com which is "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language."  

The site looks pretty interesting, check it out.

Anyway, click on the image in this post to make it big enough to read

Nice Afternoon Light For A November Windstorm

This afternoon up in St. Albans, Vermont, we had a TON of wind. I'd say it gusted to at least 50 mph.

Trees in my yard in St. Albans, Vermont, are tossed in strong,
50 mph wind gusts as they are lit up in a golden color by
the setting sun.  Beautiful!  

Toward evening, the setting sun lit up the trees rocking in the gales.

I took a quick iPhone video of it. It's not the greatest quality but you get the idea of the dramatic beauty of the brightly lit storm.

(I also took some video with my higher quality Canon Rebel camera, but I haven't had a chance to look to see if that video is workable yet.

Anyway, here's the iPhone video to give you an idea. I love light and drama. Hope you do to.

For A Change, A Good Deed Goes Unpunished As Bus Driver Saves Woman

On Oct. 18, Darnell Barton, 37 a bus driver in Buffalo, N.Y. stopped his bus on a tall overpass when he saw a woman on the edge of the span apparently ready to jump off and commit suicide.

 Darnell Barton, a bus driver in Buffalo, N.Y., while on the job,
convince a woman not to commit suicide. For once
his bosses offered only praise, not flak.  

His bus had 20 high school students on it that he'd just picked up, and he told them to wait there.

Barton coaxed the woman from the edge, consoled the woman, and called for help. The woman was saved.

Where this story takes a welcome turn for me is the lack of negative consequences for Barton.

Too often, you see somebody do the right thing and either somebody interferes by criticizing him for their actions,  or their employers say they didn't follow the rules and must be fired.

This time, according to an account in the Buffalo News, everybody made the right move, which is so refreshing to hear. Barton stopped the bus and saved the woman.

Barton said much of the credit went to the kids on the bus, who sat quietly through the whole drama so as not to disturb the woman further. Plus, they all got a lesson about compassion from the bus driver.

Only when the emergency was finished did the kids make noise. When Barton got back on the bus, they gave him a round of applause.

His supervisors at NFTA the bus company had only good things to say about Barton, whose job with the company seems quite safe, thanks.

According to the Buffalo News:

"We are all extremely proud of Darnell's heroic actions," said Kimberley A. Minkel, the NFTA's executive director. "His quick and calm response during a very stressful situation speaks volumes about his character and his unwavering willingness to help someone in need.

I've been reading some of the reader comment sections of some accounts of Darnell's actions and was struck by the number of people who had the same initial reaction as I did. Readers either expected Barton to somehow get in trouble for his actions or were surprised he didn't, because doing the right thing often brings the hero trouble, because he somehow violated company policy.

In other words, he wasn't making money for the company and instead was exposing it to some sort of litigation risk. God forbid!

So it's refreshing that in this case, everybody at minimum acted reasonable, and most went beyond the call of duty.

This is a trend I could really embrace.