Eminem's Stan was fictional but stans are a real phenomenon

Another new (to me) term I happened upon recently is "stan". Not as in Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, where the "-stan" just means "land" or "place of". But as in "look at that group of stans lining up for hours just to see a boy band".
The Urban Dictionary defines a stan as "a crazed and/or obsessed fan", used to describe a fan who goes to great lengths to obsess over a celebrity. So, not just a fan, not just a superfan, but a stan.
You can think of it as portmanteau word combining "stalker" and "fan", but the word actually comes from the name of the (fictional) central character of an Eminem song, released in 2000, who is so obsessed with Slim Shady (Eminem's alter ego) that he kills himself and his wife when the rap star does not respond to his letters.
Eminem's Stan was a fictional figure, but some music fans do go to some extraordinary lengths in their obsessive adulation of pop stars. And yes, celebrities do receive a lot of desperate, and often quite disturbing, mail from their fans/stans. Korean K-pop boy bands in particular seem to be prone to this kind of excessive adulation.
The word can now be found in the Oxford Engish Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

What is an eruv - cop-out or practical expedient?

I recently encountered the concept of an eruv (pl. eruvin), and I can kind of see what it is not something that Jewish people talk about much, and why I've never heard of it before.
An eruv is any kind of enclosure that Orthodox Jews use to allow them to get round a religious prohibition called hotzaah mereshut lereshut, which essentially says that they are not allowed to carry anything on the Shabbat or rest day (basically Friday evening until Saturday evening). More specifically, it disallows them from carrying things from the "private doman" (such as a house) to the "public domain" (such as a road), or for more than four cubits (about 2 metres) within the public domain.
Apparently, this whole prohibition arose from a specific verse in the Bible (Jeremiah, 17:22-22), which Jewish medieval scholars decided to take literally and interpret in a very specific way. You can almost imagine them sniggering in their monastic cells, as they come up with yet more prescriptions to make the lives of religious Jewish people more difficult (all for the greater gloriy of God, I'm sure).
Anyway, an eruv is way of combining and extending private and public domains - eruv chatzerot literally means a merging of different domains - so that the rather random injunction against carrying anything on the Sabbath day is not so onerous. It may take the form of a courtyard or an apartment complex or a walled city or a fence, or, in modern cities, it is often a high wire supported by wooden poles similar to telephone poles.
Almost every Jewish community in Israel has one, as do most large North American cities (including Toronto) in the main Jewish areas, and you can even check online to see the status of the eruv. Many other cities around the world with large Jewish populations also have them, including London, Vienna, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Melbourne and others. Apparently, there are raging debates in Jewish scholarly circles in some of these cities as to whether particular eruvin are valid according to the various scholarly commentaries on the subject, which has to be on a par with angels dancing on the head of a pin as far as religious debates go.
So, there you go: eruv - lazy cop-out, or practical interpretation of a ridiculous religious law. You choose.

Ontario's cannabis store lottery system completely broken

Think what you will about Canada's legalization of cannabis last year, the commercial rollout of cannabis sales is generally considered to have been poorly executed, and nowhere more poorly than in Ontario.
Since the Progressive Conservatives took over the task, there has been one debacle after another and, almost a year after legalization the process is only partway completed.
But nothing has been quite so disastrous as the lottery system for new cannabis store licenses.
First, three of the 42 licenses issued through the latest Ontario lottery are on one street - in an industrial and commercial estate in sleepy Innisfil, Ontario (near Barrie, in case you, like many others, are not familiar with it). 1982, 1988 and 2008 Commerce Park Drive are within steps of each other, and at least two of them are currently leased to an operating marine and powersports store, which apparently has no connection with any cannabis store, and at least thinks it has a valid ongoing lease. This is not a heavily populated area, and anyone shopping there would need to drive from any centres of population. You could just put it down to the luck of the draw but, as we will see, that is not the whole story.
Because, it turns out that some (most) stores made multiple applications to the lottery, choosing to load the odds in their favor by paying the $75 entry fees multiple times. One store in Oshawa applied no less than 173 times (incurring $12,975 in entry fees), but, guess what, it worked - the store won twice (!), and landed on the waiting list a further three times! It turns out that the average winning store submitted to the lottery about 24 times (and the average losing store just twice). The three Innisfil properties mentioned above put in 43, 33 and 50 applications respectively.
If it makes you feel a bit better, 7 of the 42 winning stores in the latest round of the cannabis store lottery only submitted one application. And one store in Thunder Bay that applied 92 times did not win (although it did make the wait list), while another in North Bay submitted 80 applications to no avail. But I'm really not sure that all this was intended by the system's creators.
And three stores on one street on a suburban industrial estate? How does that serve anyone's interest?

Baker City's Great Salt Lick Contest

Here's a neat idea. The Great Salt Lick Contest in Baker City, Oregon is an annual event (since 2006) in which local farmers put out 50lb salt block for cattle, deer, horses, goats, etc, to lick, and the animals lick the blocks into all sorts of weird and wonderful twisted shapes, reminiscent of abstract modernist sculptures.

The results are judged and auctioned off to benefit a local Parkinson's Disease research centre, and the winner is even cast in bronze.
The idea came from local man Whit Deschner, who noticed that used salt licks resembled art pieces, and established the contest back in 2006. And pretty impressive the results are too!

Tweedledum and Tweedledee visit Biarritz

Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Laurel and Hardy? Think of them how you like.

The comic duo hit the G7 summit at Biarritz in a big way this week. And still no-one takes them seriously - why is that...?

If Trump denies suggesting we nuke large hurricanes, he probably did just that

If Donald Trump is vehemently denying something, you can bet your bottom dollar it's probably true. So, when he tweets, "The story by Axios that President Trump wanted to blow up large hurricanes with nuclear weapons prior to reaching shore is ridiculous. I never said this", you have to assume that he did just that.
Not that he'd be the first to suggest it (although he may well have thought so). he first such suggestion came in 1961 from the US Weather Bureau, and various others have resurrected the idea from time to time ever since.
In case you were wondering, a spokesperson from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) makes the terse comment, "Needless to say, this is not a good idea", and goes on to explain that such a plan would cost many millions of dollars, potentially contaminate large areas of the world with radioactive fallout, and would not actually work anyway.

Bolsonaro blames environmentalists for record Amazonian fires

It's no coincidence that, less than a year after populist Jair Bolsonaro came to power in Brazil, satellite imagery shows vast tracts of the Amazon rainforest on fire, more than ever before. According to Brazil's space agency, 72,843 fires are currently burning, an 83% increase offer last year, and the highest since records began.
These are not just wildfires like we experience in North America and Europe. Wildfires do occur in the Amazon during the "dry"season, but to get it to burn on this scale, fires need to be set deliberately and even managed. So brazen have the region's farmers become in this new political environment that they even give advance notice of "fire days". These are farmers burning down extensive parts of the world's largest tropical forest, including areas where indigenous tribes eke out their precarious existence, and they are doing so for agriculture, particularly for cattle and beef production. So, think twice before you have that next beefburger or corned beef sandwich.
And this wilful deforestation is being presided over by the maverick right-wing politician Bolsonaro, who has expressed disdain for environmental regulations, and openly encouraged farmers and industrialists to pursue development at any cost. Well, this is what that development looks like.
And now Bolsonaro, in a move straight out of Donald Trump's playbook, is suggesting that the fires are being set by NGOs and environmentalists in order to discredit him and his environmental record. And what an environmental record! Almost the first thing he did after his election was to slash funding to environmental groups and government departments. These people don't have the resources to go about setting fires, even if they wanted to!

Elections Canada moves to suppress free speech - wait, what?

Elections Canada has drawn a rather problematic line in the sand just two months before the Canadian federal election. It has ruled that any discussion or advertising by third parties of climate change may be deemed "partisan activity", and subject to various onerous and costly bureaucratic rules and requirements. This might seem surprising and faintly ridiculous to most people, but it appears to be a serious position taken by the independent election body.
Five out of the six main parties contesting the election agree - to greater or lesser degrees - that anthropogenic climate change is real and presents a pressing problem requiring urgent action. However, Maxime Bernier's People's Party of Canada, a new fringe hard-right political  party barely deserving of the description "main party", does not. Bernier is on record as saying things like, "The main reason for climate change is not human activity", "There is no climate change urgency in this country" and "CO2 is not 'pollution' ".
For this reason, Elections Canada argues, with some rather twisted logic, that any third party, like the charity Environmental Defense for example, that promotes climate change as real and/or an emergency could be considered partisan, i.e. anti-PPC. This would require them to register as a "third party" for the election, including all the various onerous and expensive requirements that this carries with it. It also might jeopardize a group's charitable tax status.
This is a rather ridiculous state of affairs. Climate change, and Canada's response to it, is a bona fide election issue in this election, especially given that some parties want to play it down and not take it too seriously and others want precisely the opposite. So, to hamstring the participation of outside pressure groups in this way, because of the unsupported views of one minor fringe party, is itself tantamount to partisan election interference - even suppression of free speech - if you ask me.