1 WELL IT’S A HOT ONE In what’s rapidly becoming one of the hottest years on record in North America, much of Saskatchewan must feel like it’s seven inches from the midday sun, just in time for Margaret Wente to argue that poor people really want air conditioning and therefore it is a necessity(?????), hooray. (Incidentally, did you know that Shaunavon is one of only five Canadian towns participating in an international study of extreme weather conditions? It’s true!)
2 JASON KENNEY GIVES HIMSELF CONGRATULATORY ASS-SLAP For that thing we were talking about last week. Good news is he’s been getting roundly derided for it. Protip one is that you never put a petition on your own website asking people to congratulate you for doing what is nominally your job, e.g. crafting legislation. Protip two is that if you’re going to hide behind the canard of (ahaha, DOG WHISTLE ALERT!) “bogus asylum claimants” getting better health care than seniors, maybe make sure seniors are getting better health care than “a level similar to that provided by provinces to people on social assistance,” you colossal turd.
3 CALGARY STAMPEDE DROPS FRENCH VERSE FROM “O CANADA,” PREDICTABLY Come on, dudes, this is just sort of embarrassing. What kind of grown-ass person can’t remember the like three lines of obligatory French we insert into “O Canada”? It’s not even so much that this is offensive to Canada’s history as a bilingual country, it’s that it makes Western Canadians and Albertans in particular look like people with absolutely shitty memory retention for basic things that aren’t cowboy hats and lawn chairs and the kind of unconscious Anglocentric imperialism that’s offensive to Canada’s history as a bilingual country.
4 AM I A BROKEN RECORD ON THIS RIM THING The beleaguered Canadian tech company is definitely not going to shutter its doors as its executives run off into the night with burlap sacks full of what’s left of the company’s money, no sir. (I mean that literally, they’re apparently just going to lay off 5000 people at a time instead. The tech sector!)
5 THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH EVER POSTED TO THE INTERNET Oh my god imagine waiting like fifteen minutes for this .gif of four ladies in dresses with text overlaid to load on your computer. Imagine being a CERN employee in 1992 and using the very first version of Photoshop to make what was basically the very first image macro. Oh my god imagine all of that stuff.
6 FRANK OCEAN DROPS CHANNEL ORANGE A WEEK EARLY One of R&B’s hottest rising stars is Frank Ocean, a member of the California weirdo rap collective Odd Future. His new album was supposed to be out next week but he put it on the Internet last night for everyone to hear it instead. It is pretty good.