And you thought Vancouverites were weak in the snow. This video from the storm that dumped on us put our neighbours in Seattle to shame.

Breathe easy. Oxygen detected in the atmosphere of one of Saturn’s moons.

The big kids try to disentangle scrapping twins in extremely dangerous chess game. US State Department tweets its move of the day: “encouraged Beijing to make clear that North Korea’s behavior is unacceptable.” Really, diplomats? Twitter? If your North Korean counterparts had access to it, I’m pretty sure the response would be #whatever.

Related must-read essay: David Rothkopf on The Fine Art Of Lunacy In Foreign Policy.

Willie Nelson busted for weed.

Stay classy, Halliburton.

Awesome: how to draw an owl.

Wednesday Bloody Wednesday. Poor Ireland.

The US has now been in Afghanistan for longer than the Soviets were. Nine years and fifty-one days. How did that end for the Russians again? Oh…

Meanwhile, as Canada continues to search for the exit door, Andrew Coyne in Macleans says we should stay scrapping until the Afghans can fight for themselves (against themselves?). It is, he says, “the least we can do”, and besides, our troops totally want to be there anyway:

We have to stop thinking of them as scared 19-year-old conscripts, as in Vietnam or the Second World War. These are professional fighting men and women, who have trained for this job for years. They’re not like you or me. They’re highly motivated, intensely idealistic adrenalin junkies. The casualties we have taken—129 killed by enemy action since 2002, compared to the 211 police officers and firefighters killed across Canada in the same period—they regard, not as inexplicable tragedies, but as occupational hazards.

So they really get high on the action, eh? Now that’s good foreign policy.

Why Rupert Murdoch’s iPad newspaper The Daily will fail.

Cosmologists ponder evidence of “events” prior to the Big Bang.

The Top 10 Consequences Of Having Evolved.