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A curious juxtaposition

Posted on by Patrick

Just fin­ished reg­is­ter­ing my new toast­er oven (or “mini oven” as the com­pa­ny would have it). On the last screen, where I’m encour­aged to set a pass­word for my new account (one more I’ll prob­a­bly nev­er sign into again), I was asked two questions:

  • Do you want to receive occa­sion­al emails from the com­pa­ny about prod­ucts and ser­vices? (No. As usual.)
  • Do you own a Nespres­so™ machine?

Uh…

Curi­ous as to why they’d be inter­est­ed in my sit­u­a­tion vis-à-vis Nespres­so™, I did a quick Google search for [company name] nespresso. Turns out that the com­pa­ny makes com­pat­i­ble land­fill-chok­ing pods for the Nespres­so™ machine.

Live and learn.

Compare & contrast

Posted on by Patrick

One of my all-time favourite Christ­mas car­ols is “Ça Berg­ers”. (Most of my favourite car­ols are French, since I came up in a French immer­sion school. It makes it hard to find them, liv­ing as I do in a pre­dom­i­nant­ly Eng­lish part of Man­i­to­ba. Oh well.)

Every year I look it up on YouTube. The first year, there was one ver­sion, not a great one. It sound­ed like it’d been record­ed in a high-school gym onto cas­sette, and prob­a­bly was.

This year: There are plen­ty of choic­es. Here are a cou­ple for you. (Well, for me.)

The choral version

The death metal version

(with altered lyrics, natch)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxZjA7cao3Q

Which do you prefer?

Snoopy’s Christmas

Posted on by Patrick

For those that did­n’t care for yes­ter­day’s Giger delights, I offer this.

When I was a kid, we had this song (along with the oth­er two Snoopy vs. the Red Baron tunes, and a bunch of Roy­al Guards­men songs on the B‑side) on an LP with a pink card­board sleeve. I must have come pret­ty close to wear­ing the record out over the years.

I actu­al­ly still have the record (thanks, Mom!) but a) I don’t have a record play­er and b) it’s pret­ty bad­ly warped now, so  the last time I tried to lis­ten to it, it sped up and slowed down to a degree com­pa­ra­ble to the songs they play on Lip Sync Battle.

Fun fact: As a kid I assumed the sound effect on the line “The Baron then offered / A hol­i­day toast” was a toast­er pop­ping out toast. Now I know it’s a cham­pagne cork. Ah, youth.