by Andrew Morrison | The new (and terrifically vapid) Canadian edition of the Huffington Post wonders if the beaver is still a potent image of what it means to be Canadian, “or are we clearly due for a new and improved national symbol?” Such a profound question! Here’s another: is the future of Canadian journalism to be written by bubble gum twirling interns fresh from Bishop-Strachan?

He may have his heart in the right place, but no amount of Twitter followers can stop Ashton Kutcher from being an asshole and a bully.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s death, The New York Times publishes an op-ed by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s friend and biographer, A.E. Hotchner. In it, he posits that Hemingway tried to kill himself several times (eventually succeeding with a shotgun in the mouth) in part because the FBI was tailing him and bugging his phones. His friends and family chalked it up to paranoia, but it turns out he was right.

What happens when you mount tiny cameras to the tips of fireworks? Oh.

Did William Shakespeare smoke a lot of weed? There is some evidence that suggests he may have. A pipe with traces of marijuana in it was found in his home in Stratford-upon-Avon some ten years ago. Also,  Dunsinane was “high” and there are definitely some sections of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that have pothead written all over them (“My Oberon! What visions I have seen! Methought I was enamoured of an ass!”). Now an academic is petitioning to have his bones exhumed for testing. If the legendary Bard’s drug use ends up as scientific fact, cue the inevitable consequence: some idiot parents will demand to have his plays banned from the school curriculum and dog-eared copies of Richard III will be traded for grams of coke in highschool smoke pits across the English-speaking world. Sigh. “My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain.” I feel for you, Shakes.

Yaarrrh! Somali pirates go hi-tech with “GPS systems, satellite phones, and open-source intelligence such as shipping industry blogs in order to figure out the location of ships.” I don’t know about Interpol, but we follow them on Twitter.

Toronto’s TTC to sell subway station and line names in $324 million advertising gambit. Maybe we should do that here, as in “I’m on the Donnelly Hospitality train heading north on the Edgewater Casino Line. Meet you at Bob Rennie Station in five.” Best city ever!