ColbyCosh.com

...from the Null Device: the homeless are disguising themselves as tourists and using the new Heathrow terminal as a hotel, and the BBC has proven (on paper) that you can traverse England from Penzance to Berwick-upon-Tweed, and make many other impressive journeys, entirely on local buses.

My latest Post column is about the B.C. government's decision to give residents on the low-income Medical Services Plan coverage for acupuncture. I've also got a bonus gadget review on FullComment.com.

An example of why Martin Wolf may now be the world's most respected business columnist. "Getting away with producing adulterated milk is hard; getting away with an investment strategy that adds no value is not." (þ: Marc Andreessen)

Photos like this classic, snapped by the Toledo Blade's Jeremy Wadsworth, that ran in the Mar. 3 Sports Illustrated alongside a feature on Rays superprospect Evan Longoria. The photo shows Longoria's Durham Bulls teammates reacting to an "explosive" game-tying home run in a 2007 International League playoff game. (Six months later, other newspapers were still raving about both the moon shot and the snapshot.)

This Will Arnett interview leaves me a little conflicted, because I'm still trying to sell my own ironic nickname for Toronto but "T-Zero" does crack me up.

The column I originally wrote for Friday's edition of the Post will now run in print on Saturday because of space constraints, but it is already a web hit over on Full Comment. I count at least 10 thermonuclearly-controversial statements that might get me punched in the head within the piece's meagre Sun Media-esque length. Let's see what happens.

[UPDATE, 4:11 pm: Breaking news—provocative column about Newfoundland receives muted, slightly approving reaction in Newfoundland! See Michael Collins, Griff, and (for a dissenting view) Newfoundland News of Note, as well as the comment thread at the original column link.]

At long last, an Internet personality quiz based on the real world: Which Supreme Court (of Canada) justice are you? (Hat tip, along with ruminations on the results: TheCourt.ca)

An interesting question came up this morning in the Alberta Baseball Confederacy's private chatroom: has there been a major change in the Enemies List for Edmonton hockey fans? The evidence I've seen shows that there are already two lists in existence, one for older fans structured thus:

1. Calgary
2. Dallas
3.-29. (everybody else)

And one for the younger fans, who don't remember Neil Sheehy or Jamie Macoun or Mike Bullard or Jim Peplinski:

1. Dallas
2. Calgary
3.-29. (everybody else)

Of course, details vary from fan to fan. I could probably make a complete 29-team list and justify the exact order. Calgary and Dallas would ordinarily be 1-2, although right now they are actually hard teams to despise. When it comes to the Flames I often find myself, as I have in their current series with San Jose, rooting against the team but quietly, almost unconsciously cheering for Jarome Iginla. The Stars have Daryl Reaugh in the booth and a roster full of Finns, two elements that make them inherently attractive to the Edmontonian. It's only when you see Turco and Zubov out there, and the bile surges, that you remember to hate them.

But the misgivings don't matter so much, because pretty much everybody's list now looks like this:

1. Chris Pronger and whatever team he's playing for
2.-3. Calgary/Dallas
4.-29. Everybody else

This will be the order, for pretty much all of us, until Pronger retires or is fatally injured in an imaginary furniture fire. Whichever comes first.

Is the Canucks' transitional regime about to spend $2M on a Swedish kid who can't make the Tre Kronor cut and disappeared in the playoffs of the country's third-best league? If the Oilers are going to keep their heads above water in the Kiprusoff-Luongo-Backstrom Division, this is the kind of thing we need to see more of from our rivals and less of from our own front office.

I've written a short Post editorial on the death of physicist J.A. Wheeler. (A reader has notified me that plutonium does occur naturally in submicroscopic amounts, contradicting the high-school first-approximation-to-actual-knowledge about the transuranics that I failed to double-check, so need to give me hell all over again for that slip-up.* I hate like poison to queer a decent obit by saying something that's going to have the experts pshawing.) Elsewhere, I raise questions about a news item from Germany.

*[UPDATE, 3:16 pm: Mercifully, the piece was held an extra day, so the final edit has been fixed, and the online version has been cleaned up with an annotation in the comment thread.]

The life-altering URL says it all: Hockey-Reference.com.

You've gotta be cruel to be kind, said the poet—and it turns out to be especially true in the case of the Canadian commercial seal hunt, wherein, as I explain in my latest National Post column, politicians are contemplating steps contrary to animal welfare for the sake of appearing more humane.

That's what it seems to have been, anyway: looking back at my published work reveals an editorial on the latest black mark for soft-headed Canadian penology; a signed column on the Baltovich acquittal and the use of hypnosis to "refresh" the memories of prosecution witnesses; and an early attempt to interpret and assess the new Supreme Court decisions on sniffer dogs.

Japan Probe wonders about the political implications of one tiny, fluid little consonant.

CBS News just described Justice Antonin Scalia as "one of the best writers on the [U.S. Supreme Court] panel". How about that? One of the best. Don't crawl out too far on that limb, guys. I didn't watch the segment on the Israeli Air Force; did they perhaps describe it as "one of the more significant agglomerations of aviation know-how in the Middle Eastern region"?

You probably didn't like having your transit system held hostage on Friday night, did you? No reason you should. Here's the closest thing resembling an explanation for the snap strike that has yet been offered by Amalgamated Transit Union local president Bob Kinnear:

We knew we would be severely criticized for striking with no warning, but our first duty as a union is to protect the safety of our members. If only one member had been assaulted by a passenger angered by the impending strike, that would have been one too many.

In other words, Kinnear claims to have acted on the premise that giving advance warning of a strike would have placed his members in more danger from an outraged public than stranding hundreds of thousands of people downtown and freezing the city for a weekend did. Seems to me that (at five a.m. Monday morning) it's still an open question whether he was right or wrong, and there exists a corresponding question of incentives. If you prove him right, you'll confirm that the strike was your fault—you're a boorish, dangerous mob that needed a weekend to cool off from your entirely unjustified anger!—and you'll leave the same line of argument open to himself and his successors. Is this how you intend to let yourselves be treated?