1 THIS WILL DO WONDERS FOR PRO-MONARCHY SENTIMENT I… I guess they’re renaming Big Ben “Elizabeth Tower“? Why are they doing this.
2 OBAMA “JILTS” CANADA The Globe & Mail has a rundown of an article in Foreign Policy that claims that Obama has “jilted” Canada but I’m maybe wondering if it’s just that Canada’s government has, over the past five or so years, simply made a series of decisions that have been unpopular internationally, and this is just another instance of someone being a tremendous wiener about the fact that people internationally do not really like us anymore. (That we maybe don’t care doesn’t indicate we’re grown-ups now, like a certain pundit in one of our national newspapers claimed this morning. If a child takes a shit in the sandbox and either throws a snit or just doesn’t give a shit when other people complain about his bad behaviour, he is usually not afforded grown-up status for it!)
3 VICIOUS WEATHER Yes, it’s going to probably thunderstorm like the dickens today. And yes, a tornado chaser probably knows a lot about tornados. But Environment Canada probably knows more, and a blog speculating that tornadoes might happen is far different from a weather alert saying tornadoes will happen, so everyone stop shitting your pants, please, about hypothetical maybe-tornadoes, and instead just grab a comfy chair and get stoked to watch God rain vengeance down upon your lawn, for its crime of being a lawn.
4 PAROLED DEVELOPMENT Or something. Anyway the new episodes of Arrested Development are apparently going to be released in one big chunk next year. Hopefully they’ll also be released in Canada, though I can’t see any reason they wouldn’t be (the Fox run is all available, and (godawful) Netflix original series Lilyhammer is also available, so it seems to logically follow).
5 CITY OF BIG SHOULDERS (THEY ARE BIG FROM HAVING TO MOVE A LOT OF DEAD BODIES) So Chicago has a murder problem. When prairie dog dude-in-residence Mason Pitzel and I went down to Chicago a couple of years ago, we spent time at a cool venue in a rough area of town. One night we tried to leave and were told to stay inside the venue and just sort of wait for transportation to arrive for us. This was because vans needed to be corralled because taxis were not interested in driving out to us because someone had just been shot dead a block and a half north from our venue. That is your story for today about someone you sort of know from his writing on a newspaper and blog being near a dead person who was shot.
6 THEY FIXED THE ENDS The “Extended Cut” downloadable content for Mass Effect 3 hit Xbox Live today and is currently downloading on my machine. Why is this significant? It’s sort of like subjecting a film to wide release, finding out people don’t like the ending, and then reshooting and rereleasing the film while allowing everyone who previously bought a ticket to come back and watch the film again, which is obviously all weird. Then again, I’m not sure most movies are so badly botched in writing and execution that the Better Business Bureau winds up opining that the game’s ending rendered its marketing campaign false advertising so maybe this is a special case.
