Call this a shameless plug for The Brick stores in Peace River and Slave Lake.
The Page always checks out The Brick ads in this newspaper when they appear. We’re always looking for a good deal on some outdoor furniture or what can pass for that. And in particular, looking to see when TVs are going to be free!
Maybe we are just too optimistic. But we have to say, big screen televisions seem to be getting cheaper and cheaper, and of course, even while quality is improving. Sure it’s nice to look at a 75” or 85” Super WhizaHooliOED or whatever. But honestly, in our household, the eyes can’t tell much difference between the $799 special and the $3,999 WunderFlash.
We also use the excuse that “Who cares if it doesn’t look quite as good. Keep the cheap one for a year and next year, the same amount of money will buy a TV twice as good.”
Then there is our well-known Grandma Jonesy and her famous words of wisdom: “You want a bigger TV and louder sound? Sit closer!”
Speaking of TVs, The Page’s so-called “better half” still hasn’t figured out how to “exit” out of a Netflix or Prime movie, and get back to regular cable.
To quote her: “If this #$@& TV is so smart, why the heck is it so hard to do something so simple?”
We’ve actually said this before but we think it is worth repeating. These days it takes a long time to unload a new TV off the truck, carefully undo the boxing, slide the TV out, unwrap all the plastic and take off the labels, read the instructions how to put the stand together, try the different ways it can still be done wrong, finally get the stand and screws all in the right place, and finally get the TV placed properly.
After that is all done, it takes Even Longer!! to get a Smart TV to actually work!!
Coming soon to a store near you: Smart Chairs. We’re pretty sure we will end up sitting on the floor when that happens. Thank goodness our microwave has two very, very important, even we can use them, settings on it: On for 30 seconds. Push several times to add more time. And popcorn!
These days, it’s hard to believe much of the “information” on the Internet. Case in point are traffic counting services we use. We use them to figure out how many people are viewing our online websites.
The good news is, traffic continues to increase. The bad news is, one of the counters we use tells us almost half of the traffic to one of our sites is “bots.” These are automated little software gidgets doing all kinds of things. Usually scraping our sites, and sending back information to its users. Those users are usually a search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo.
So, the different counters we use try to weed out the “hits” from the bots and give an idea how many real people are using our sites.
The “trusted” counters we have say, on average, our newspaper websites, southpeacenews.com, smokyriverexpress.com and lakesideleader.com did a total of 159,914 real people visits for the month of September.
If you go to any of those sites, you will see story shorts and links to two other sites: theregional.com and albertachat.com. These are news sites that carry news from community newspapers across Canada, and across Alberta respectively. These two sites had a total of 95,916 real people visits during September.
Theregional.com in particular has many interesting stories about local politics (and shenanigans) in communities across Canada. Almost all the stories we never hear about in mainstream news.
A woman needs a root canal. But, her dentist is on holidays. She says she really needs work done. The dentist office sends her to another dentist across town.
When she gets there, she sees the name on the door. She thinks to herself, “Hmmm. I went to school with a guy with that name. I wonder if it’s him.”
After she is seated in the dentist chair, the dentist comes in. The woman thinks to herself, “No way this is the same guy. My guy would be about my age. This dentist is all old and wrinkled and kind of bent over. And this guy is bald and is wearing thick glasses. It’s not him but maybe he is some older relation.
The dentist does a root canal and tells the woman she should make an appointment to get a crown fitted. The woman is thinking about her regular dentist to do the work, but she is also thinking of her old classmate.
“I’m sorry, but I just have to ask, are you from town here?”
“Yes, I am” says the dentist. “Born and raised here and came back from college to practice here.”
“Did you go to school here?”
“Yes, I did as a matter of fact,” the dentist replies.
“Really? What years did you go to school?”
The dentist tells her and she says, “Oh my gosh, you were in the same classes I was!”
The dentist leans in close, takes his glasses off, looks at the woman, carefully concentrating on her face and finally says, “Really? So what did you teach?”
Less than four weeks to Halloween!
Our office black cat Slink Panther is getting excited! It is a big day for black cats, goblins and witches!
Have a great week everyone, and best of luck to all the candidates seeking office.