Matt Of All Trades

This turtle crashed through the windshield of a car in  Florida. A woman was injured, but the turtle only suffered a scratched shell. We all hate it when something flies up on the highway and dings or cracks our windshields. It's even scarier if you're unlucky enough to have something crash through the window as you're driving.    And the thought of that object crashing through the windshield being a turtle is just absurd.  But that's exactly what happened in Florida recently.  Because, as we all know, weird news always gets generated from Florida.  According to the Daytona News Journal, describing the incident on Interstate 95 in Port Orange, Florida: "The 71-year-old woman, a passenger in the vehicle, suffered a half-inch to an inch cut above one of her eyes but did not lose consciousness Port Orange police spokesman Officer Andre Fleming said late Wednesday." Authorities said the woman is going to be fine. Speculation is another car hit the turtle, laun...

Sad faced Larry Kudlow says Biden will force us to drink plant-based beer. .Who wants to tell Larry beer has always  been plant based.  Donald Trump's goofy former economics advisor Larry Kudlow was in yet another panic on Fox News the other day.  Apparently, Kudlow is trembling in his Tom Ford loafers because the Green New Deal, and by extension, President Biden's climate change policies, will force us all to drink only plant based beer!  The horror! Beer is currently made out of hops, grain and yeast --- oh right! Hops and grains are plants! The evil Green New Deal has already changed, um, nothing about beer.  Who wants to tell Kudlow the news? Never mind that the Green New Deal doesn't tell us how much meat we can or cannot consume. Biden's climate policy makes no mention of how much meat consumption Americans will be allowed. But, the ever fearful Kudlow still wants to rile the ever-fearful Trump base. His rant: "America has to, get this, America has to stop...

Ben Shapiro, proud of his, um, wood, outside a  Home Depot in his mocked viral video.   Ben Shapiro bought a little piece of wood at Home Depot.   This sounds like a who cares sentence, but leave it to Shapiro to make this into another farce.  Shapiro, for those who don't know him, is a young, hapless conservative pundit who is expert at self-owns and non-sensical, "helpful" suggestions.  A classic example: He once gave this simple, elegant solution to people who will eventually have their homes flooded by rising sea levels brought on by climate change.  Shapiro sees this as no problem at all.  The flooded homeowners can just sell their property and move.  Sell to who? Aquaman? Anyway, Shapiro is pissed off these days because several large Georgia-based corporations, like Delta and Coca Cola, object to Georgia's new voter suppression laws. Everybody knows the laws are meant to get rid of black voters to keep the GOP in various offices. (It n...

This burglar would soon meet his match  Viral home surveillance video is out showing a break-in at a Pasadena, California house, but two Good Samaritans thwarted the would-be thief.   The video, which you can see below, shows the burglar stopping at a fountain around an outdoor patio before entering the house to start sniffing around.  That didn't last long as two security agents chased the suspect from the house.  These aren't all the usual suspects and heroes, however. Here's the vid:

Ted Nugent: In the running for stupidest person of 2021? UPDATE: Though I hate to cheer when people get sick, it does look like Karma has hit our buddy Ted Nugent. After pretty much denying that Covid even exists for the past year, guess what? Nugent has Covid. "I have had flu symptoms for the last ten days.  I thought I was dying. Just a clusterfuck....I was tested positive today.  I've got the Chinese shit." Ever the poet, even in illness, is he? Despite his illness, he's still apparently against the Covid vaccine because, as he falsely says, "Nobody knows what's in it." Well, we don't know what's in that brain of yours, either.  PREVIOUS DISCUSSION I know I'm a bit of a bully but I just love picking on some dumb people.   Not every dumb person.  Hell, I'm not the sharpest crayon in the shed, which is how I like to mangle that expression.   Nevertheless, I still like to take the hot air out of the blowhard variety of stupid person, so ...

One of the worst Congress creatures in the U.S. is  even hated by his own siblings.  Arizona Republican Congressman Paul Gosar might be kind of popular with the Trumpian, frankly rather wacko wing of the party, but it's pretty certain many of his relatives won't help him with any re-election campaign.   I've seen ambivalent family members of politicians before.  But this family is downright hostile. In my opinion, pretty justifiably.   Gosar helped spread false conspiracy theories about the November, 2020 election and was one of the main organizers of the January 6 "Stop The Steal" rally that turned into the insurrection at the Capital. He also recently skipped voting on the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill so he could attend an extreme right wing political event that was organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Gosar's siblings are unimpressed. So unimpressed that they put out a video condemning their brother.  "He should have criminal conseq...

A guy in New Mexico recently discovered that he had unwittingly turned into an Uber for 15,000 bees.  Happens to us all the time, right?   You go to the grocery store, leave the window cracked open on a toasty day, come back out, load the groceries and suddenly you find the car is filled with 15,000 bees. Wait, what? This, at least, is what happened to a Las Cruces, New Mexico man .   Only after the man left the local Albertson's and was tooling serenely down the road when he discovered the bees. At that point, the man did the only sensible thing: He dove out of the car in the middle of traffic. According to the Las Cruces Fire Department, firefighters arrived to find a swarm of bees inside the vehicle. In the end, the motorist, the fire department and the bees came through the ordeal fairly well. On their Facebook page, the department said they don't normally remove bees, but they wanted to mitigate the "mid-afternoon hazard the large swarm presented in a relativel...

At least in my opinion, this financial company's CEO  is way too interested in his employees' sex lives.  He doesn't want you working for him if you've had premarital sex. Ugh! I can't resist a little more on this terrible boss that has come to light a couple weeks after I first posted this. Dave Ramsey and Ramsey Solutions was predictably sued because the firm is being run as a sort of "religious cult" and demands that employees give "complete and total submission to Dave Ramsey and his views of the world to maintain employment." You can see a lot of the reasons why this seems to be so in the rest of the post below. However, Religion News Service gives additional details in relation to this lawsuit.  Ramsey is a dangerous type. Both megalomaniac and stupid.  The lawsuit, of course, boils down to Ramsey's stupidity regarding the Covid pandemic. Says Religion News Service: "Lawyers for Brad Amos, a former Ramsey Solutions video editor, a...

An image from a very simple, but also very effective PSA from Google encouraging us to get Covid vaccines. A lot of public outreach is going on now to encourage everyone to get their Covid vaccines to defeat this horrible pandemic once and for all.  A big part of the effort are public service advertisements, designed to convince us all to get our vaccines.  The more we overcome the hesitancy among some people to get the shot, the closer we get to herd immunity and end the pandemic.  Spoiler: In my case, they're preaching to the choir.  I am SO looking forward to getting my first Covid shot this coming Wednesday. One ad that came out about a week ago is from Google. You can see it at the bottom of this post, and it's totally worth the watch.  If you watch the ad, a warning: If you're anything like me, you might need a Kleenex, because the one minute PSA packs a surprising emotional punch.  At least for me, it did. I don't know why I reacted to the ad as I di...

Some right wingers (and a few kooks) are mad that Vermont Gov. Phil Scott has decided to do more to prioritize the state's small BIPOC population for Covid vaccinations becausetheir vaccination rates were falling behind.  Vermont Gov Phil Scott, doing something that I thought was sensible, tweeted the following on Thursday:  "If you or anyone in your household identifies as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color (BIPOC), including anyone with Abenaki or other First Nations heritage, all household members who are 16 years or older can sign up to get a vaccine!" Meanwhile, other people under the age of 50 need to wait a couple weeks before they can get themselves appointments for vaccines. Scott did this because Vermont state health officials and many others noticed that the BIPOC community bore a disproportionate share of Covid cases, hospitalizations and death. This same group is lagging behind in vaccination rates. The Vermont statistics say at all. As of Friday, about ...

This Darren Cole of Chicago is a great, law abiding guy. Another Darren Cole, not so much.  This has made the Good Darren Cole's life a living nightmare Photo from Chicago Tribune  There's a fine, upstanding man in Chicago named Darren Cole. He just wants to mind his own business, but police keep confusing him with a not as fine, upstanding other Darren Cole, and it's made Good Darren Cole's life a living hell. He's suing the Chicago Police Department over the matter.  According to Vice: "Thanks to a longstanding case of mistaken identity, Chicago officers have held the 50-year-old at gunpoint, threatened him with violence, punched him in the mouth, and forced him to lie face down in the snow, according to a federal lawsuit he filed against the city." Cole has been detained about 60 times since 2006.  The Good Cole shares an almost identical driver's license number, name, and birthday with someone with an outstanding warrant.  It's not as if the Ba...

A new Me Decade? I'm writing off the jerks.  Matt Walsh is the repugnant, smug sort of fellow who says things like the gun ownership is a more important right than voting and that it should be easier to buy a gun than to vote.  He's an idiot who I don't normally pay much attention to. I mean, why even bother? But this fairly recent tweet from Walsh for some reason stopped me in my tracks: "Got on an elevator without a mask. Guy with his wife demands I put one on. I say I don't have it, but you'll be fine, calm down. He stops the elevator and storms off, calling me 'disrespectful.' It's true. I am. I am not going to respect your paranoia. Get a grip." This tweet crystallizes for me the ethos of all the entitled jerks out there, the ones that have been given "permission" by the Former Guy Trump to ignore the civility, intelligence, reasonableness and we're all in this together attitude that most of us are more or less into. They...