It’s a story that’s done every year in the Spokane area. We’re well-known for our potholes. I wanted to try something different with it. Watch below!
I wanted this to be a parody of the show COPS and decided early on that my character needed to have a (horribly-delivered) Chicago/Midwest accent. Knowing this would probably not fly, I also shot a version without an accent. That’s the version that aired. This is the version I wanted to air. I think the right call was made, but here it is… Pothole Patrol: Awful Chicago Accent Edition
The oceans are incredibly important to life on Earth and it is my belief that we must protect them at all costs. The plastic waste pollution in our planet’s oceans is quite concerning. There’s a giant floating mass of plastic bigger than Texas floating in the Pacific for crying out loud!
However, on Wednesday, I came across the result of an alarming new study released this week from King’s College London in collaboration with the University of Suffolk that says cocaine was found in the system of shrimp caught in rural rivers of Suffolk County.
Of course, it was! We’re polluting their waterways with our Starbucks cups! How else are they supposed to cope?
So, the study didn’t outright say “Shrimp are doing cocaine”, however, am I expected to believe that drug dealers are just dumping enough coke into the rivers of Suffolk County to get shrimp high on coke? You tell me which one is more likely.
For the past week, Katmai National Park in Alaska has been holding their annual “Fat Bear Week.” It was new to me this year, but I’m hooked.
I’ve had the privilege of visiting Katmai National Park and seeing the bears feast at Brooks Falls and it was truly something to behold.
And now there’s a tournament where the people vote for which bear is the fattest? It’s basically the most important election of 2018. Count me in!
There were a lot of Fat Bears this year, but ultimately it came down to these two behemoths.
Beadnose (left) vs. Bear 747 (right) in a gigantic finale to find the fattest bear in Katmai National Park
Although I feel like the camera angles help, Beadnose in this matchup (she’s sort of squatted down which pushes her fat up), ultimately Beadnose took the championship this year.
But all of the bears gave their best effort to get fat and I wanted to honor them. So I emailed Sir Elton John to ask if he’d do me the honor of singing a tribute song I wrote for the fat bears of Katmai National Park. I never heard back.
I did hear back from an out-of-work, off-key and out of time Elton John impersonator named Kyle I found on Craigslist. Here’s the touching tribute to these magnificent beasts. Congrats, Beadnose!
People have some stupid ideas, but the other day I saw one of the stupidest: A 22-pound dumbbell phone case.
Yeah. This thing is being sold by a company in Japan and while the dude modeling it looks nice enough (and jacked, surely due solely to his 22-pound weight curls he does while browsing for supplements and looking at Instagram photos of himself in bodybuilding competitions), there’s no way carrying around your phone while it’s attached to a 22-pound dumbbell is in anyway convenient.
But was I missing something here? Was this an opportunity? I decided to go that route and look at it as a way to enter the emerging market of phone cases. That Japanese company sold at least one (maybe).
I bet I could invent a cool and totally useful phone case and sell at least two!
Here’s what I came up with: The Coffee With Cory Colander Phone Case!
Here’s a little public service announcement this morning for residents and leaders of any city… in the world (remove sunglasses and insert dramatic music here)!
Today I was educated on something I never knew was an actual problem, but it’s something we can all work together on to solve and prevent.
What’s below our city?
Sewers. Exactly.
Now I used to think the only thing in our sewers was waste and adolescent turtles that know karate and only come out at night to fight bad guys and eat pizza, but I was apparently wrong.
Sewers run under out cities like arteries and veins, and much like arteries and veins, they can apparently get clogged up. Not clogged up like I clog up my toilet after nacho night, but clogged up like your heart gets clogged up and causes a fatal heart attack.
Such was the case in Baltimore, Maryland recently.
What are you looking at there? Welcome to Baltimore’s sewer. You’ll see… no ninja turtles… no singing Christmas poo.. just a giant congealed glob of fat.
This is known as a *Fatberg* and crews say it took about 50 to 60 years for this blockage of fat, grease and oil to form. As you can imagine, it’s not just fat, grease and oil. Mixed in with that you have decades of flushable wipes, diapers, cotton swabs, bandages, a bunch of plastic bags, rubber gloves, pens, batteries, pennies, coins, anything that you flush down your drain.
As our sewer systems age these fatbergs are becoming more and more common. They just had to remove one on London.
So just like your heart, if you have a blocked artery, you have to go in and perform a bypass. That’s what you see in the video above. It’s a robotic camera with a 2,000 pound per square inch pressure washer and an industrial vacuum goes in and clears the fatberg.
Now again, these fatbergs need to be caught sooner than later. I actually found (doctored) footage of them spotting the one in Baltimore.
Getting regular check ups can save your city’s life. The fatberg in Baltimore took $60,000 and a week to remove. Cheaper than an actual heart surgery, I imagine.
There are preventative measures you can take so your city’s arteries don’t get clogged up.
don’t treat your toilet like a trash can. Whatever you flush down your drain can contribute to these clogs.
Don’t feed your sewer line red meat.
Make sure your sewer line is getting at least 30 minutes of cardio a day.
It’s actually been a pretty good year for wildfires in Washington, at least by comparison to years past (knock on wood).
We have a few wildfires burning in our state, but the Evergreen State has largely become the Smoke State in the last few weeks thanks to fires burning in Canada.
The result for us in Spokane has been some of the worst air quality in the nation. Literally. The Spokane area has been ranked as the 2nd worst air quality in the United States, second only to San Bernardino, California.
Clean, breathable air has been hard to come by in the past few weeks in the Inland Northwest. Well, necessity is the mother of invention, so… I have the solution.
I always thought I’d make a great lawyer. There are few things I love more than arguing seemingly ridiculous ideas in an attempt to sway someone to my side. I spent a good majority of this past election season doing just that (it didn’t work).
But it was the motivation I lacked. The reading. The studying. The law books that read like Latin to me. Pig Latin I ould-way een-bay okay-ay ith-way. But not real Latin. They study law exclusively in Latin, don’t they? Perhaps I should’ve investigated that a little more. At any rate, here I am today, writing a blog that a total of 15 people at most read. I think I made the right choice.
It’s also the dedication. Arguing or not, I’m not sure I’d be okay with trying to get someone I knew was guilty off because of some loophole, or my insane ability to manipulate people.
However, I hope if I’m ever in need of a lawyer, I find one as dedicated as Miami lawyer Stephen Gutierrez.
Mr. Gutierrez was defending a man on trial for arson. The State of Florida claims his client set his own car on fire. Mr. Gutierrez would stop at nothing to get his client off. If you ask him, he’ll say what happened next was not some stunt to really prove his point that his client’s car ignited due to spontaneous combustion. He’ll say it was just a coincidence.
It’s okay, Mr. Gutierrez, we know. We know.
During his closing arguments, Stephen said he began to feel heat (UNRELATED: Feel My Heat – One of the greatest movie scenes ever) coming from one of his pockets. Then came the smoke. There was a fire in his pants. And not the kind you tell a girl who is way out of your league at a college party. The real kind. (I just realized why the “There’s a fire in my pants” line never worked.)
Mr. Gutierrez ran out of the courtroom, extinguished the flames and came back uninjured to a shocked courtroom.
Was it him taking dedication to his client to the next level or just a crazy coincidence?
We’ll never know. But we know. Hats off to you Mr. Gutierrez.
The jury knows too. They convicted his client.
I couldn’t find video of this incident, but who needs video when you can just grab your Undertaker action figure and recreate yourself? It went something like this:
Cory Howard 