4 in the Afternoon 1 ENVIRONMENT CLEANUP COSTS CRAZY Federal Environment Commissioner Scott Vaughan has released a new audit suggesting that costs to clean up contaminated resource extraction sites and the like will run around the $7.7 billion mark, and cautioned against lax environmental oversight, which sounds depressingly familiar.

2 SASKATCHEWAN SERVER PROTECTS POUTINE Well, sort of. Elections Canada apparently tracked Pierre Poutine to a proxy server in Saskatchewan, but that trail’s gone cold. The proxy server would have let Poutine disguise “his” IP address – and thus “his” identity – when accessing “his” account with Rack Nine, the centre at the centre of Robocallgate. It also would have let “him” watch stuff on Hulu. Pierre Poutine’s got it figured out, people.

3 WHITE HOUSE GAY MARRIAGE TANGO After Joe Biden told David Gregory on this weekend’s Meet the Press that he was totally cool with gay dudes and ladies getting all kinds of gay married, one has to imagine that White House press secretary Jay Carney immediately poured himself a stiff drink and put on his favourite Guided By Voices record for the last half-hour of pleasure he would know for quite some time. The Washington press corps has apparently been relentless, pressing the guy with a bunch of variations on “Well what is President Obama’s opinion, then, buddy.” Over fifty questions in one day, to be precise. Ha ha wow wouldn’t it be crazy if the Washington press corps hivemind was this rabid about oh I don’t know let’s say drone bombings I mean wouldn’t that just be nuts

4 WHERE THE WILD THINGS WERE American author and illustrator Maurice Sendak has died. Sendak, whose works include the utterly classic Where The Wild Things Are, treated kids not like lesser creatures but like the tiny half-formed adults they are, with complex emotions and a love of weirdness and darkness, and so he wasn’t afraid to scare the existential shit out of them sometimes. There’s a bunch of great memorials out there today; check out the ones from NPR’s Fresh Air, the Guardian, Slate, the New Yorker, and of course the New York Times, the latter of which might have actually made me cry. If you’ve still got it in you – or want to know what dude was about in his own words – the Globe and Mail ran an interview with him last year that was both characteristic and totally timeless.

FEEL BETTER WITH THIS VIDEO OF CATS PUKING SOUNDTRACKED BY ELECTRO HOUSE No wait don’t go I swear this is more worth it that it sounds