CNN’s off-beat news reporter Jeanne Moos gets caught up in a satirical Canadian political video.

The 2012 Winnipeg river skating trail has been shifted to the Red River from the Assiniboine River this year.  The unusually mild temperatures have caused thin ice on the Assiniboine.  The river levels are also very low.  In the middle of January there is open water on both rivers, unheard of!

Open water under the Main street bridge on the Assiniboine.

The skating rinks at the Forks by the train bridge.  Those boxcars must have been built-in the 1950′s.

The start of the skating trail on the northeast side of the Norwood Bridge.  More open water in the distance.

The view of the trail on the other side of the bridge.  It appears to go on forever.  A person could go for a never-ending skate. A guy would have to take a taxi back as exhaustion could kick in.

‘Calamita Cosmica’ (Cosmic Magnet in English) is a 28 meter long sculpture of a human skeleton created by Italian artist Gino De Dominicis and is on display at the Museo Nazionale della Arti del XXI Secolo – MAXXI museum of contemporary art in Rome, Italy. Except for the strange long nose, is a perfect scaled model of the human skeleton.

Before Calamita Cosmica settled at the MAXXI, it toured Europe for a number of years visiting places such as Versailles, Naples, and Milan. The Giant was first unveiled in 1990 at Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, France. Thereafter in 1996 it moved to the courtyard of the Palace of Capodimonte, Naples. In 2005 it was at display at Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona, Italy – the home town of the artist. In early 2007 it moved to Palazzo Reale at Milan and after few months it landed in Versailles at ‘Parterre d’Eau’, in front of the facade of the Versailles Chateau. Thereafter in 2008 it was at display at Musée des Arts Contemporains, Hornu, Belgium. After the display in Belgium it was moved to Rome, where it currently resides.

The NHL All-Star game is one of the most useless concepts ever devised by a human being.  It is a complete waste of time and energy.  The players move at less than half speed and they don’t touch each other.  There is no defence, no checking and definitely no rough stuff.  It is like watching paint dry.

Back in the sixties and seventies there would be fights between players during the game.  And the intensity was almost the same as during the regular season.  But in the last while the game has devolved into a corporate promotional event.  The sport has been taken out of it.  It is all about advertising.  There really is no use for this game.

It does raise some revenue for charity which is good.  But watching those players skate around at 35% and not going into the corners is very funny, and I would say quite disgusting.  The Ice Capades are more dangerous than this sorry excuse for a professional sports game.

And the format for the picking of teams is asinine.  Whoever thought this one up should be deported to Nunavut. During the 2010-2011 season, the NHL announced a change to the way the teams were selected, modeled after drafts in fantasy sports. The conference vs conference (East vs West) approach was replaced by a player draft, conducted by the All-Star players themselves, to determine the rosters for each team. The captains for each team now select players from a combined pool of both fan balloting and the NHL Hockey Operations Department. The change in format was a joint effort by the League and the National Hockey League Players Association.

And the brain trust that thought up this years game entertainment brought in a Homie from the Hood to Rap during the second intermission.  This Hip Hopper was from some giant U.S. city.  The game this year was held in Ottawa.  Tickets for the game were too expensive for young Rap fans.  So this guy was Rapping to white middle-aged suburbanites.  Go figure.

Wow, 34′, 80 mph, 900hp, 6 machine guns, $600,000. Texas knows how to make a proper police boat.

The Pogues are a great band.

The Fleur de Lys restaurant in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay may serve French cuisine but that hasn’t stopped them from adapting their own version of an American classic: the hamburger. Called the “Fleurburger 5000″ it’s no Plain Jane either, featuring a juicy Kobe beef patty topped with a rich truffle sauce and served on a brioche truffle bun. And this burger comes with its own beverage, a bottle of 1990 Chateau Petrus, that is served in Ichendorf Brunello stemware that you get to keep.
It sounds (and looks) delicious — as well it should for the whopping price tag of $5000. And if you do decide to indulge no worries about bragging rights: you can bring a friend (they get a free burger when you order yours) and you’ll also get a certificate in the mail (along with your keepsake glass) so you’ll have both a witness and paper proof.

The Italian Truffles make this burger so expensive.  The truffles are regarded as some of the tastiest fungus in the world.

Danger Room

The Russians are pretty sure they know why their Mars moon probe fritzed out. It must have been U.S. radar waves, emanating from a facility named after the hated Ronald Reagan all the way out into the depths of space. And wouldn’t that be just likeReagan?

Alas, that’s “utterly impossible,” says Brian Weeden, a Danger Room pal and a former officer with the U.S. Air Force Space Command. Radar just doesn’t work like that. And the Pentagon denies the whole thing, of course. Problem is, Weeden says, “it’s going to be almost impossible to disprove to the believers.” Welcome to another edition of Tinfoil Tuesday, our exploration of the planet’s least likely conspiracy theories.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, recently sought to unravel the mystery of why Russia’s expensive Phobos-Grunt space probe fell to Earth last week. The probe, launched in November, was supposed to take soil samples from the Martian moon Phobos. Yet it never got out of Earth’s orbit. And the Russians have a culprit: American radar stations.

And not just any Russians, the deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin. “There is evidence indicating that frequent disruptions in the operation of our space technologies occur in that part of the flight path that is not visible to Roscosmos and is beyond its control,” Rogozin said, citing none of that evidence. He added, a little defensively, that his version of the truth “has the right to exist.”

Short answer: no, it doesn’t. “I’ve heard of full-mooner theories,” says George Little, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, “and this is one of them.”

Longer answer: This couldn’t be true.

But give this to the Russians. The most likely U.S. radar site to mess with a Russian spacecraft is in an Army installation at the obscure Pacific Ocean location known as the Kwajalein Atoll, where powerful radars provide the U.S. early warning on “deep space and synchronous satellites, particularly those in low inclination orbits.”

That radar site just happens to be named after Ronald Reagan. You can see how the Russians might get the wrong idea.

Still, the idea is indeed wrong. As it happens, some amateur sleuths and conspiracy-debunkers did the math on the Phobos’ positions when it passed over the Kwajalein radar. During each of the probe’s two passes, it was below the radar’s horizon.

But even if it got a full blast of Reagan, the radar waves wouldn’t have destroyed the probe’s electronic systems. “It’s just nuts to claim that even a full-power blast from the radar could disrupt a satellite in this way,” Weeden says.

And it seems that the Russians actually know it. Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin ultimately concluded that the probe malfunctioned because of boring old “errors during production and test works, as well as the engineering flaws.” Someone just needs to tell the deputy prime minister. This isn’t something that can be blamed on Ronald Reagan.

As of January 20, 2012, the tower’s steel has risen to the 92nd floor, concrete flooring is at the 86th floor, and glass panels have reached the 70th floor.  The building’s structure is expected to top out in April 2012, whereupon its 408-foot (124 m) radio antenna will be installed.