Saturday Night Special

Happy birthday.

Who says the Pope doesn't pull his weight?

 And I feel that I cannot conclude without saying a word to the absent ones today, to those absent but central figures: the men and women of the mafia. Please, change your life, convert, stop, cease to do evil! We are praying for you. Convert, I ask it on my knees; it is for your own good. This life you are living now, it won’t bring you pleasure, it won’t give you joy, it won’t bring you happiness. The power, the money, that you possess now from so many dirty jobs, from so many mafia crimes, is blood money, it is power soaked in blood, and you cannot take it with you to the next life. Convert, there is still time, so that you don’t end up in hell. That is what awaits you if you continue on this path. You had a father and a mother: think of them. Cry a little and convert.

You heard the man. Convert.


As long as we remember that someone (ie- Putin) asked for this:

Russian troops used armored vehicles, automatic gunfire and stun grenades on Saturday to seize a Ukrainian airbase in Crimea a day after President Vladimir Putin signed laws completing Russia's annexation of the Black Sea peninsula.

Ukrainian forces also abandoned a naval base after attacks by pro-Russian protesters, and had to surrender two flagship vessels to Russian forces.

Related:

Stephen Harper paid a visit to Ukraine on Saturday, becoming the first G7 leader to witness the devastation in Kyiv as he took in the battle-scarred city square at the heart of the country's pro-democracy uprising last month.

Dogs are more sympathetic to us than we realise:

 In 2009, psychologist Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni showed that human yawns are contagious for dogs. But later that year, Aimee Harr was unable to replicate that finding. In 2010, Sean O’Hara and Amy Reeve uncovered more evidence in support of contagious yawning for dogs, but not nearly as robust a pattern as Joly-Mascheroni found. Karine Silva provided a partial answer, in 2012, as to why some researchers seem to find contagious yawning while others didn’t. She discovered that dogs were more likely to yawn after hearing the yawn of a familiar human than of an unfamiliar human. That actually makes a good deal of sense: if yawning is tied to empathy, then dogs might be more willing to empathize with familiar people than with strangers.

I knew there was a reason why I liked dogs.