Author: Joey deVilla

Faced with their growing unpopularity, Canadian Prime Minister, Control Freak in Chief, and seller-out of Canada’s sovereignty to Chinese oil interests Stephen Harper and his party, the Conservatives, are pinning their re-election hopes on a “give cash back to voters” strategy.

The bad news is that it’ll work, for the same reasons as those observed by Rick Mercer about Rob Ford’s fan base:

“We would rather have a guy on crack than a mayor who will raise our taxes. We don’t care if he drives his Escalade drunk through the city; we care that he wants to privatize garbage collection. We will vote for a gerbil if we get a dollar back.”

In case you missed it, here’s the Rick’s Rant on Ford Nation:

He should be happy that he doesn’t work at Hobby Lobby.

How much damage did Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes do to his parents’ house and possessions over the comic strip’s ten-year span? According to this recent paper published in the Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science (PNIS), just under $16,000 in repair and replacement costs, based on present-day prices. The accumulated costs are displayed in the graph below, where you can see that most of them were incurred in the strip’s first year:

Click the graph to see it at full size.

If the paper’s writing style or the acronym of the publication — PNIS — got your “science senses” tingling, give yourself a pat on the back. PNIS is a humor publication in the guise of a scientific journal in the same way The Onion takes on the form of a newspaper. According to their About & FAQ page, PNIS articles fall into one of three categories:

• HARD, short for Honest And Reliable Data: “…the serious PNIS sub-journal. Papers published in HARD use actual data that were collected in some way by the authors (for example, data collected from an Internet resource (and properly cited, of course), or data from an experiment conducted by the authors).”
• SOFD, short for Satirical Or Fake Data: “Papers published in SOFD use data that are fabricated by the authors for some purpose (for example, fake data from a fake experiment).”
• Editorials: “…papers that generally do not have any associated experiments (real or fake) or hypotheses (real or fake). Mostly, their content is about science itself (and science-writing in particular).”

My inner 14-year-old was pleased to see this graph charting the projected readerships for HARD PNIS and SOFD PNIS in their introductory editorial:

Click the photo to see the source.

To celebrate the first Halloween in my new home, I can’t think of a more appropriate costume than the one pictured above. In case you don’t get the reference, it’s from the Simpsons episode where Marge, deep in the throes of a gambling addiction, forgets to make a costume for Lisa’s state pageant where she’s supposed to be Florida. Homer ends up making the costume pictured above, and when Lisa tries it on, she says “I’m not a state; I’m a monster!“.

Here’s another example:

Click the photo to see the source.

Where in Tampa can I get this kind of foam?

Found via Vault45. Click the photo to see the source.

I’m sure that the photo above depicts a performance art piece than the bride addressing her guests at the reception, but this being Florida (where no idea is a bad one), it wouldn’t be completely out of place.

Found on Imgur. Click the photo to see the original.

This was the view from my kitchen window on Wednesday. For those of you who don’t recognize the vegetable I’m holding, that’s a patty-pan squash.