And the Rest of It

A few things happening ...



Never let a good crisis go to waste:

Canada’s highest court agreed on Thursday to hear Toronto’s challenge to a unilateral decision by Ontario Premier Doug Ford that slashed the size of city council midway through the last municipal election.

The legislation nearly two years ago cut the number of council seats to 25 from 47 and sparked widespread anger from critics who denounced it as undemocratic and a vindictive measure from Ford, a failed mayoral candidate and one-term councillor under his late brother, former mayor Rob Ford.

What a great time to challenge this decision while Premier Ford is attempting to hold down the fort due to what the Chinese did to the world.




There are students who are quite capable of learning independently with little assistance or direction. Learning online would be useful for them. Now, in the time of national lockdown, it is essential:

Online learning is poised to transform public education across the country as provinces and school boards scramble to complete the academic year – a paradigm shift that could reshape education long after the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

Already, with little direction from provincial governments, parents with children temporarily at home are filling the learning gap, which can include navigating the sea of online learning portals and private tutors. And education experts say significant parts of the movement toward remote learning will likely soon be integrated into curriculums, reframing discussion around the issue in the months and years ahead.

Oh, pack it in, you stupid b@$#@rd!:

Peter MacKay is facing growing criticism for his insistence on going forward with the Conservative leadership race, even amid a health system crisis and economic crisis due to the CCP Coronavirus.

With nearly all the candidates calling for the race to be postponed, MacKay continues to insist that it goes ahead, as if nothing else was happening in the world.

And now, MacKay is seeming even more tone deaf.

In an interview with Evan Soloman, MacKay said people should “ask why” the other leadership candidates want the race stopped.

Expect a pink moon in April:

In early April, avid sky-gazers are in for another treat—a super pink moon, the biggest supermoon of 2020. This full moon is considered a supermoon because it coincides with the moon’s perigee, or the point in the moon’s monthly orbit when it’s closest to Earth. According to EarthSky, the lunar perigee occurs on April 7 at 2:08 p.m. EST, and the peak of the full moon follows just hours later, at 10:35 p.m. EST.

One of Antarctica's nearly-forgotten explorers: 

Charles Wilkes barely had time to announce his Antarctic triumph before British rival James Clark Ross (celebrated discoverer of the North Magnetic Pole) began to steal his thunder. Wilkes’s mistake was to send the lagging Ross his historic first chart of the east Antarctic coast. A year later, when Ross retraced Wilkes’s route, he found the American had been deceived in places by glacial reflections and had mistaken ice shelves for actual coastline, marking it several degrees too far north. These errors did nothing to undermine the substance of Wilkes’s discoveries, yet Ross and the British Admiralty built a public case against the American claim—with great success. Most 19th-century maps of Antarctica do not recognize Wilkes’s remarkable 1840 feat. Even his obituaries in American newspapers made only passing mention of Wilkes’ polar discoveries.

In the 20th century, Wilkes would finally get his due. In 1912-13, Australian explorer Douglas Mawson was the first to revisit the east Antarctic shores mapped by the Vincennes. Mawson so admired Wilkes’ navigation of the ice pack in a wooden sailing ship that he christened the entire coast “Wilkes Land,” which remains the largest continuous territory on Earth named for a single individual.