Jim Balsillie - Rejected!!!  Photo: Cbc.ca

The bankrupt hockey team in the middle of the desert still has no owners.  Renegade business man Jim Balsillie, he of Blackberry billions, is completely and officially out of the running after his bid was rejected, with prejudice.  Tha… Read full post »

This is a wonderful little tribute to two of the men who have brought science into the mainstream in the past few decades.  Practically all footage and sound samples come from Carl Sagan's Cosmos series, and Stephen Hawking's Universe series.  Set to a wonderfully "hip-hop"… Read full post »

Winston Blackmore celebrates a legal victory in Bountiful BC. Photo: CBC.ca

Bountiful, British Columbia is a small town in interior BC that's been in the Canadian news recently.  Populated by a group of FLDS fundamentalists, the Attorney General of BC has been contemplating charges of po… Read full post »

The UN Vs. Tim Horton's ... no contest in Canada.  Photo: The National Post

Homer Simpson would be proud.  On a day when many world leaders were showing up to the UN in New York with the express intent of walking out on the speech of Iran's Ahmadinejad, the Canadian… Read full post »

Convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff.  Photo: Woopidoo Biographies

When the Madoff scheme first came to light, followed by other, smaller fraud schemes, a new meme started appearing in the mainstream press regarding the economic meltdown.  Roy Clancy displays this meme very well in hi… Read full post »

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, left, and deputy commissioner Bill Daly were in court Thursday in Phoenix. (Matt York/Associated Press)  CBC.ca

The saga of the Phoenix Coyotes continues toward the absurd.  In bankruptcy proceedings today, lawyers for the NHL quoted Meatloaf in court… Read full post »

Jim Balsillie.  Photo: Dalhousie News

How would you feel if you couldn't give away $212.5 million in the worst economic crisis in modern times?  If you'd tried, on several occasions, to give away large quantities of cash in exchange for a money-hemorrhaging product and were rejected… Read full post »

Suaad Hagi Mohamu.  Photo: TheStar.com

Suaad Hagi Mohamud finally arrived home in Canada yesterday after a three month ordeal in Kenya.  Mohamud's ordeal would be a wake-up call to all Canadians travelling abroad, but sadly, it's not something that tends to happen to white Canadian… Read full post »

I am not a knitter, though I have friends afflicted with this compulsive disorder.  And it clearly is a compulsive disorder, as evidenced by what happens when biologists learn to knit.

I must say that the frog looks reasonably accurate. There's got to be some necessary abstraction when r… Read full post »

Photo: CBC

In a landmark 4-3 ruling today, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of soul theft by upholding an Alberta rule forcing pictures on Driver's Licences.  The case actually revolved around a Lethbridge area Hutterite colony's concerns about idolatry, and the court upheld t… Read full post »

This past week, Tom Hamilton, bassist for the band Aerosmith, was forced to withdraw from part of the band's summer tour to "recover from surgery."  Earlier in the summer, lead singer Steven Tyler injured his leg and had to postpone seven shows, and in January of this year, after guitari… Read full post »

Most people see the history of the modern PC as an epic battle between Microsoft and Apple, and in many ways, thats exactly what it is. Those two companies have certainly been the most influential over the longest period, and their implementations of technology and ideas have shaped w… Read full post »

Its hard enough for modern computer users to imagine a time when magnetic tape was the standard medium of storage, never mind the notion of libraries full of meticulously sorted boxes full of punch cards. This wonderful ad (Courtesy, as always, of Modern Mechanix) for Remington Rand magnetic… Read full post »

In a recent article, Open Salon columnist Saturn Smith drew attention to the plight of Euna Lee and Laura Ling.  Lee and Ling are American journalists working for Current TV, arrested by North Korea for "grave crimes" and recently convicted and sentenced to 12 years on the charges. … Read full post »

In many ways, an outside observer might be surprised at how smoothly Canada is functioning since our constitutional crisis last December.  You can see it as either a mark of the resiliency of Canada's parliamentary system, or of the apathy of the Canadian public, but either way, 6 months… Read full post »

 
Canadian Governor General Michaëlle Jean joins in an ancient Inuit celebration of a successful hunt, May 26 2009, Rankin Inlet, Nunavut
(Photo from CBC.ca)

Canada is a bit backward politically in many ways, not least the fact that, at the base, we are still a monarchy.  While C… Read full post »

The Caesar - A Canadian tradition of drunkeness
Photo by hfabulous 

40 years ago, in an unassuming bar in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, bartender Walter Chell created a drink that is widely anonymous outside Canada, the Caesar.  While Canadians drink 350 million Caesars a year (do the/… Read full post »

The Huffington Post has a fascinating story on a study out of Ohio State University that found that conservatives are more likely to believe Stephen Colbert "only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not… Read full post »