I, for one, am stunned that no-one's said "I, for one, welcome our raspberry-flavoured overlords" and we've made it through 20-something comments.

@15: It's called peg solitaire here in Canada, but it's pretty rare now. I haven't seen a board since I was a kid in the 70s.

"That's different, they were patriots."

"Terrorists", citizen. Are you forgetting 9/11 already?

I was going to say "this is why the athletes in the ancient Olympic Games did all events in the nude". It guarantees that the person himself is the only factor.

But then I realized we were talking about professional bowling and the image made me feel vaguely ill.

There's a word (which eludes me right now) for the process whereby clever sayings get transferred from relatively unknown people to people with a historical reputation for wit. The big winners of this are Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill.

Thanks to the Internet, I think Jack Handey is the record-holder in the opposite direction.

There's a simpler explanation to this: until the 20th century, people who could read were smarter (i.e., better educated) than people who couldn't.

Consider...a literate man needs glasses to read, and gets them. An illiterate man needs glasses to read, but can't read anyway, so doesn't get them.

As a result, in a society with less-than-universal literacy, glasses are a marker of literacy, and so education, and so "intelligence".

We're only a hundred years (or less) from that kind of a society, so I suspect our present-day attitude that glasses = smartitude is a leftover from those days.

I think that the degree of legitimate black metalness that these cupcakes possess can be determined by the fact that they're named in French instead of some Nordic/Germanic language

Or at the very least they could be named Chöcolate Cüpcakes. Still, I e-mailed the recipe to myself at home -- they look delicious.

"And in related news, Scarlett Johanssen got engaged this weekend."

Britain has notoriously strict libel laws. I wonder how they think they can avoid an expensive lawsuit from a savvy victim. It's published among themselves, and in the UK the onus on them to prove that published statements are true.

That adds a whole new meaning to the expression "hung like a horse".

Yeah...if there had been one of those on my building when I was a teenager, we would have had a battle: Which is louder? The system, or my stereo cranked to 11 and playing Einstürzende Neubauten.

I was thinking about this a bit over night, and something that I realized makes Bell's move even more troublesome.

In Canada, Bell is involved in more than just internet providing. They're also a TV distribution company through their satellite dish service.

So in essence, by not upgrading their internet pipes *and* throttling BitTorrent, they're cutting off a competitor to their TV service. As they're the biggest player satellite TV in Canada, and there's much higher barriers to becoming a provider in that field, it puts pressure on people to go with them and their tech for TV instead of others.

That's beginning to smell like underhanded competition to me.

(This also opens up the possibility that Bell could move on to disenfranchise other internet services, such as VOIP, in order to buttress their landline business.)

It's not at all bizarre -- it's exactly right. If they don't throttle the wholesale customers' bandwidth, their customers will leave. It's obviously in Bell's interest.

What's not obvious is why it's in our interest. It's exactly because of this sort of thing that there's not a free market in telecomms in Canada, and we regulate the hell out of it.

Regulate away, boys!

The NME reviewed this and its partner "The Most Wanted Song" when they were released. The reviewer pointed out that it says quite a bit about music that the former was far more interesting than the latter.

The regional transit trains in the Toronto area are on an honour system, but unlike #3 above they seem to check pretty often. Inspectors come into the cars maybe one trip in twenty that I take.

The final volume of the manga Mail has a malicious baby story in it too. I think someone at BoingBoing was the one who turned me on to this series.

Ffff, Jefferson Muzzleloaders, obviously.

Grrr. "The" not "then".

the US will be forced by a trade court to eliminate it in favor of something far more restrictive

Well, no worries then. As the Antiguan gambling and Canadian softwood lumber cases have shown, then US eliminates treaty-banned practices by doing nothing then saying they've moved into line.

What is it about British guys named Mosley and Nazis?

Can't sleep...chair will eat me...

Hey, cool -- self-captioning cats. Does "I Can Has Cheezburger?" know about this?

@6

But how can it be that a private firm like a CAR DEALERSHIP gets to (Or has to?) check their customers against this list?

The United States has a long history of banning its citizens from doing any business with entities they don't like, viz. not only the embargo on Cuba but the fact that it's illegal for Americans to come to Canada and buy a Cuban cigar from a Canadian tobacconist.

Their government delights in legislating that everyone check these lists when doing business, or else.

It wouldn't have been a steamship, not in 1923. The world's navies had been switching over to oil engines for some time before that.

This is our fossil heritage, and it shouldn't be for sale...

Other things that should not be for sale by this logic: paintings, seats at the theatre, any memorabilia whatsoever, antiques, any object produced by a non-western culture for sale in the developed world....

If my own experience is any guide, "coffee and bacon" is even better at waking people.

The particularly breath-taking part of this is that the requirement is not just a regulation, or a law -- it's actually part of the state constitution. It's section 3 of Article 20:

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/.const/.article_20

Can't trump the US Constitution, but someone has to go to American federal court to get it knocked down, it would seem.

Fungi might be the first plants on land if, you know, they were actually plants. Fungi are fungi, genetically closer to animals than plants.

I'm not that confused -- what would be the point in mistreating the animal? (Besides amusement value, I suppose).

I'm eating it because it's tasty, not because I hate it or anything.

H. Jack, you better not be dissin' I Can Has Cheezburger....

Can you find the tentacle rape fetish area

"Japan".

I'm guessing that, if it wasn't a scam, the guy just invented the microwave a coupla decades early.

I'll throw in a vote for Kelsey Grammer on #2 as well.

E.T. phone Homey?

Sorry, also had to be said.

As for him being 15, I'm not sure how that's a defence if a child over the age of 12 does something particulary agregious they are often tried as adults (even in Canada)

Not at all so, Redmonkey. Canada uses 16 as the cutoff point, and even that's a recent and controversial change. Until 2003, if you were under 18 it didn't matter what you did. Even now, it's got to be a severe crime.

He was making landmines, and blew up a soldier with a grenade, he's not a citizen of Afghanistan so he is by definition an unlawful combatant

Citizenship has nothing to do with being an unlawful combatant. If it did, quite a few American soldiers would be in trouble, as joining the Army is a way to fast-track a citizenship application in the US -- citizenship you get only after you've completed your term.

Uhhh, it appears there are no remaining correct factual statements in your #5 now.

I particularly liked the great-great-great-great-grandson of Le Petomane, who zero-g farted his way through a recreation of the docking sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Can you eat your god and have it too? I DON'T THINK SO!

Attention, Heretic! Denying that communion involves the actual blood and body of Our Saviour invites the attention of the Catholic Inquisition! Please remain where you are for pickup and orderly execution.

@6 and Cory, there's a thriving underground for modding HeroClix, especially for the Mutants & Masterminds superhero tabletop RPG. One of the many hobbies I turned out to have more ambition than talent for...

Not only is there a cross in the background, close examination shows signs of a "decorated tree" as well. As you may know, many Christians use these to celebrate so-called "Christmas" as part of their cult. Clearly, there's something afoot.

And pictures of kittens, Zuzu.

@3: Warren Ellis had Invisible Woman ask the Thing that of him particularly. His answer? "You don't wanna know."

Oh dear Lord. I must possess one of these to inflict on my 6-year old nephew.

Is it possible to catch anyone off-guard in 2007? Too many people watching, and it only takes one to notice and get it to the BoingBoings of the world for the furor to start all over again.

The silly thing being that it's an obvious end-run around the spirit of the law, and the law makers don't care in the slightest. The question really is "So why is it still a law up here?"

@9: It makes them think this thing is a good idea.

On the other hand, the government's been pushing the Liberal Party pretty hard with unpalatable measures lately. This is a question of whether the Liberal opposition want to risk an election over this issue more than the Conservatives. Since the Liberals were responsible for C-60, I'm guessing they wouldn't.

@Mr. Protocol: Edgy or not, it's the spiritual heir of Calvin & Hobbes. I love it to bits.

The Cardbo story, the fishing story, and the one where she draws on her sleeping dad's face are exactly what little kids are like. I remain amazed how well they translate; unlike a lot of other manga they rarely descend into culturally derived incomprehensibility.

"That elephant is huge! Look, he's pooping! His poop is huge!"

@1: It's "Cardbo". One of the volumes in Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&! series has a great little story about two older girls making him as a costume and then fooling the titular character into thinking that he's real.

So I suppose the point is that it's for fans of the series. He's even got the coin slot that the girl in the costume was using to extort money.

Stoves also not looking so good:

http://www.schmidtandclark.com/Stove-Tipping/

On the other hand, to the extent that banks these days often store their fiat money as mere blips of magnetism on a computer...isn't this "new" crime essentially the equivalent of most embezzling cases in the last ten years?

I use the semi-colon all the time. My style of writing is so ridiculously discursive I have to drag out every way there is to organize my thoughts in text: colons, semi-colons, em-dashes, parentheses.

I just checked and there were nine of the little buggers in my last (4,300 word) published column. Yes, I am a giant orthography nerd, thank you for asking.