Swiss Chalet goes full sports bar

I've been a regular at Swiss Chalet since my kids were little. Reliable, predictable, never great but always good, you knew what you were getting when you made a date at Swiss Chalet.

Almost as good as Red Lobster.

So we didn't have any reservations about taking Bubby to Swiss Chalet for Thanksgiving dinner. They've even got a "Thanksgiving Special!"

Little did we realize that Swiss Chalet has had a makeover. There's a big-screen TV in every corner, just like every sports bar in town.

The new booths have way too much distance between the bum level and the chin level. The ever-shrinking 89 year old Bubbinator found that the top of her water glass was actually over her head. She had to reach up for her water.

My 89 year old mother-in-law suggested to the staff they needed to provide booster seats for the elderly.

And what's up with the canned music? Is the management team trying to capture a new demographic? When we were having Thanksgiving dinner and the after-church crowd was just streaming in, the sound system was pumping out Run DMC and Aerosmith's Walk This Way.

Really?

In Owen Sound for Thanksgiving dinner?

They've also tampered with the menu items. One of the fixtures of a Swiss Chalet dining experience, at least for the forty years I've been a customer, is you get a decent Cesar at a decent price.

The Cesar is still a decent price, but the glass is thinner and taller, and get this; instead of getting a celery stalk in your drink, you get a pickle instead.

What the fuck is that about?

I want a piece of celery in my Cesar, not a pickle spear lying on top of it!


But that's progress, I guess.

Pot addled hillbilly predicted legal cannabis industry collapse a year ago

That's when the mainstream folks, especially the pot-addled twats at the Globe and Mail, were still in full pump mode on the Great Canadian Legal Weed Pump and Dump Scam.

Now the mainstream folks are predicting "a bad trip for the legal pot industry."

Told ya so!!!... over a year ago!


Up in smoke indeed!

Justin Trudeau's bulletproof PR stunt

We've been warned for months that unspecified entities are looking to disrupt our democracy.

Could be Putinist trolls sowing doubt about the democratic process...

Could be Putinist trolls riling up your deplorables to commit whatever deplorable things those people have up their sleeves.

Could be Putinist trolls turning French against English, Indians against settlers, vegans against carnivores, gay against straight. When diversity is your strength, you unfortunately give the enemy (Putin and his massed troll armies) many more loose threads with which to pull apart the very fabric of our democracy!

So after being repeatedly warned by many experts across all media, no one can feign surprise that it's finally happened; Trudeau now campaigning in bulletproof vest.

That's right! Not only that, but "uniformed tactical officers wearing heavy backpacks surrounded Trudeau as he addressed the crowd."

Oh my! Right here in Canada!


 

Wait a minute... do those guys with the heavy backpacks look like an RCMP tactical squad? Or do they look like a central casting version of same? What do you suppose could be in those heavy backpacks? Their heavy weapons?

When the bullets start to fly, they're gonna take off their backpacks, fish out and assemble their weapons, and return fire?

Does Justin look worried?



I smell PR stunt!

Before It's News: clickbait or bastion of free speech?

Blogger is by far the biggest platform of its kind. I've been on it for eight years.

A few months after I fired up The View From Falling Downs, I got an email from someone at Before It's News asking if they could "syndicate" my blog. I'd never heard of them. It looked to me like they "syndicated" damn near anything they could get their hands on, from corporate press releases to weather reports. Their business model, as far as I can tell, involves generating internet traffic to sell advertising. A lot of the stuff you'll read there seems aimed at people who truly believe God anointed  Donald Trump to make America great again.

Needless to say, it's not a place where you'd expect to find a particularly sympathetic audience for my shit.

As my web traffic has been increasingly throttled by Google algorithms, I thought I'd take a look and see if anyone is reading my pithy insights at Before It's News. I tallied up the total views for everything I wrote in September. Twenty-six posts on Blogger garnered a total of 312 views.

Only twenty-three of those made it onto Before It's News. Maybe they've got algos too? But those twenty three posts got 1,837 views.

Twelve views per post on the biggest blogging platform in the world.

Eighty views per post on a fringe website.


That's the power of the algorithm!

Best conspiracy theory of the day

Everybody knows Trump was early in with the World Wrestling Federation, which morphed into the WWE. The name may have changed a little but their staple remains the same; scripted wrestling dramas with fake heroes and fake villians.

Fakery abounds!

So here's the scoop. When Donald Trump (aka Mafia Don, Donny J, Trumpenstein, etc...) moved into the White House, he moved a whole lotta former WWE script-writers into the basement.

No shit!

It's obviously true.


Pretty much every headline you see proves it.

Media malfeasance

Within forty-eight hours of Nancy Pelosi announcing the Trump impeachment initiative, the brain trust that runs Canada's national newspaper of record weighed in on the matter with utter certainty; Trump was guilty of treason.

There's a belief among Globe and Mail "thought leaders" that they can't be seen as deviating too far from whatever the NYT/WaPo/WSJ consensus might be.

If they would stick to reporting actual news, that editorial would not have happened. Ukraine-US history didn't begin with Trump's phone-call to Zelensky. It didn't even begin with the US sponsored 2014 Maidan coup.

Nor did political corruption in the Oval Office begin with that call. As near as I can tell, even when you put the worst possible spin on Trump's "arm-twisting," it's nothing more than a business-as-usual moment in American history.

Trump may be a serial liar, but he's not the first American president to tell a lie, or lots of them.

Trump may be using the office to enrich himself, but that's a time-honoured American tradition. A number of US presidents of the past were born in poverty. None of them died in poverty.

What was the Clinton Foundation other than a massive pay-to-play scheme?

If our "free press" were even remotely free, they'd be giving us the whole story.

Instead, they relentlessly pursue an obviously partisan agenda that bears little or no resemblance to lived reality.

Ultimately, this is not about Trump. The same media that today denigrates Trump at every turn, never missed a chance to kiss his ass in the twenty-five years before he entered politics. How else did Trump become a "celebrity?"


What's really threatening America's elite isn't having a serial liar in the White House. It's having a self-proclaimed "socialist" knocking on the door.

Ellen DeGeneres and her pure Christian heart

You have to hand it to Ellen; she's done more than most Christians to visibly activate the "love your enemies" dictat found in the Bible.

There she was last week, yucking it up with Dubya, the President who worked tirelessly to deny gay marriage, not to mention having started the odd illegal war here and there.

The liberal icon obviously has a bottomless well of forgiveness!

At some level, it's discouraging to see how she has been corralled into the Bush Brand Rehabilitation Initiative.

It's just a matter of time before she reconnects with this old friend.