Good morning, Possums. We’re back, with the latest in our gamified political briefing coverage. Today’s title fits into our arbitrary, overarching nomenclature theme. So far we have had:
On Parliament Hill, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau discusses the federal government’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) pandemic. He is joined virtually by federal ministers Patty Hajdu (health), Mary Ng (international trade) and Karina Gould (international development), as well as by Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, and Dr. Howard Njoo, deputy chief public health officer.
And, after five years away recovering from The Accident, The Cryptosphere is back! With an exclusive interview with darkweb researcher DarkDotFail on how his site was stolen by hackers in a man-in-the-middle attack. And the attack was thwarted and reversed DURING the interview!
It’s not every day that we conduct an interview which is rudely interrupted by the resolution of the entire premise of the interview, but it does happen occasionally. It happened once when we interviewed a hacktivist who had to hang up because the nurse was taking him to rehab, where he’d been put as a result of his hacking. It happened again yesterday, when we interviewed the primary journalist/researcher behind Dark.fail, a domain which they’d lost control of, and which they regained while in conversation with me. Us. Whatever.
[Hello, Officer Friendly]
Dark.fail is a website that attempts to review the reliability of various darknet sites, many of them drug-related, but many not. It is maintained by a team of fewer than a dozen activists and researchers.
On April 29th, a hacker or hackers seized control of the domain and switched it to point to a dupe of…
I’m not the dainty type, Possums. You know that by now. My motto is “49 degrees latitude, 360 degrees attitude,” with “Hard to kill” hot on its heels. I have been called a cross between Dorothy Parker and Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. All to say that you wouldn’t expect me to be the type to own a tutu, let alone two. Or more.
Yes, more.
And I’m still waiting on yet another one to come in, been waiting for four and a half years now, but the pressure is somewhat off, given what I discovered in the closet.
You can find the most amazing things in closets, from sexual identity to Narnia. What I found was tutus. Well, and also a bag of bloody human teeth but more on that later.
The worst Morning After The Day Before of my life.
Flashback to my Accident: I fell down the stairs and landed on my head, nearly bleeding out and giving myself a head injury that would have cost most people their lives, and put an end to my cybersecurity journalism covering hacktivism. Being unable to earn a living, and saddled with a very expensive course of physical therapy, I created a fundraiser, and raised more than expected, so I was able to pay The Sister back for a lot of the help she’d given me over the years, buying glasses, getting my dentistry taken care of (still have a bag of my own decayed fangs upstairs, no idea why I was keeping it in my sock drawer. Now I’m keeping it in the box where my nail polish resides, much more logical), and so on.
As part of the fundraiser, I offered to put a tutu on and pose with a shoe on my head. The problem, Possums, was that I did not own a tutu. A friend volunteered to make me one, but life got in the way as it tends to do, and that tutu is still somewhere in the ether.
It appears that at some point I lost patience (moi? unthinkable!) and ordered a tutu from somewhere else in the ether, and it appears equally that at some point it arrived. And it’s been hanging in the back of my closet for the intervening four years. Who knew?
I do remember when my friend Cathy came for a visit from Vancouver I ordered an extra-special tutu just for the dinner. I was still pretty brain-damaged so I spent much of the dinner staring idly into space, but at least between that and my tissue silk batwing top in baby pink, I looked damn good doing it.
Here is the extra-special tutu:
Of course I got it in my trademark grey.
The other one from the back of the closet is just a plain long skirt with a few layers of tulle on top. In, yes, grey.
The third is only a virtual tutu, but if I recall (which is always a question) it was going to be turquoise or a grey-blue. I was feeling festive that day.
Anyhoodle, clearly I have a photoshoot that I owe you once I decide which shoe to use. Might use the infamous Bus Boots which I wore for seven straight days on the Greyhound, from Victoria to Ottawa. The boot on the head thing is its own kind of chic, as our Grand Vizier Vermine Supreme can attest.
In related Eventually Getting To The Point news, I needed a tutu this morning. For why, you ask? I refer you back to the title. I was in for a poking. And oh, baby, you know how bad I wanted it! A good skirt is a major advantage when you’re looking to get poked, as is a top that shows some skin. No skin, no poke.
We tried, and failed, to sign up for the AZ jab on the Ontario government website. Because Doug Ford sux, that’s why: the stupid website (he probably paid some guy abroad or the son of a donor $20 for the site on Fiverr) was trying to send us to the next town over when we’d literally have to pass three different pharmacies that are giving out the vaccine in order to get there.
Correction: five pharmacies.
Anyhoodle, here’s what we’ve discovered. IGNORE the provincial government site, pick the pharmacy closest to you, and go to that company’s website to register. This gets it done, gets it right, and gets you in the system faster.
Pick the one closest to you (in our case, a Shoppers) and they will have a particular page where you fill out a form to get in the queue for your vaccine. The government site…
Good morning, possums, and welcome to the latest in our Completely Arbitrarily Named Briefing Bingos. There is a unifying concept, if a completely arbitrary one because everything is meaningless and nothing matters anymore, and also because the post needs a title in order to go live, but the title has to be chosen before the briefing happens because time is linear, but nobody has guessed it so far. The concept, not the nature of Time.
Your guesses can go in the comment section for a chance to win fabulous, completely imaginary prizes. Nobody has even attempted this yet, but we’re getting to the point where there’s no excuse. Gonna get pretty obvious soon. Much like whether or not we’re getting an election this year.
It’s not easy being green
We’ll plant 2 billion trees over the next ten years. That’s it. That’s the tweet.
Here’s our video, starting fifteen minutes late today so you get to mark your “Starts more than ten minutes late” square right off the bat. 557 people watching right now. By 2pm that’s gotten up to 1500, but Fridays are always lower than Tuesdays for some reason. It’s not like people are off to the cottage on Fridays these days.
raincoaster 