The best toilet paper ever

Charmin Extra Strong is the only toilet paper that I'm going to buy from now on. It has the perfect combination of strength and comfort, just like Clint Eastwood in The Bridges of Madison County.

I can never go back to weak regular toilet paper that falls apart with each use. You could use this stuff to dry your car or wallpaper your kitchen.

Why is it so good? Let's see what Charmin's website has to say about it:

Charmin® Extra Strong holds up better than the regular kitten brand to help get your family clean. That’s because it has uniquely woven FlexWeave fibres for extra strength. And it still has the softness you love!

Wait a minute, what does regular kitten brand mean?

kitten \ˈki-tən\, noun
a young cat; also : an immature or young individual of various other small mammals

The bottom of their website states: Claims valid only in Canada. That explains things a bit, like why they wrote fibres instead of fibers. You know, just like Kellogg's Fruit 'n Fibre, a delicious blend of wholewheat flakes packed with your favorite fruits including raisins, coconut, banana, apple and hazelnuts. Your spoon just can't escape the fruit!

So I did some more research, and apparently all toilet paper in Canada is made out of kittens! To citizens of the United States this might seem cruel, but Canadians have a long history of using kittens in a variety of products such as toilet paper, Canadian bacon, and Labatt Blue beer.

That's one of the reasons why Canada's murder rate is so low - they take out their anger on the kittens instead.

Free music album download with lots of Canadians, hey

Nettwerk Records and the Vancouver Sun were offering a free album download this weekend with some pretty good bands - many of them from our neighbor to the north - Oh Canada! It's nice to get some really free music on the internet, even if it's Canadian.

The official download offer ended earlier this week but you can still get the album here: http://www.badongo.com/file/4307984

Here are the artists featured on this album:

Seriously Westcoast Life Vol. 1

* Sarah McLachlan -- Afterglow (Live)
* Barenaked Ladies -- Wind it up
* The Weepies -- Gotta Have You
* Leigh Nash -- Ocean Size Love
* Josh Rouse -- Hollywood Bass Player
* Uh Huh Her -- Say So
* Great Lake Swimmers -- Your Rocky Spine
* Fauxliage -- Rafe (Gabin remix)
* The Be Good Tanyas -- Ootischenia
* The Perishers -- Victorious
* Datarock – Fa Fa Fa
* Moev – Yeah Whatever
* The Format – She doesn’t Get It

Checkers is even crappier than previously thought

The perfect game of checkers ends in a tie? No way! And it took scientists from Canada to figure it out - probably because our public school system in the US is so bad. Damn that No Child Left Behind Act! I'm sure glad the scientists took time away from trying to cure cancer to finally solve this mystery.

From Yahoo!: The perfect game of checkers ends as a draw, Canadian computer scientists reported on Thursday.

The team at the University of Alberta said they had "solved" checkers, the 5,000-year-old popular board game also known as draughts. Their computer program, Chinook, spent more than 18 years playing out the 500 billion possible positions, they report in the journal Science.

"This paper announces that checkers is now solved: Perfect play by both sides leads to a draw," Jonathan Schaeffer and colleagues wrote in their report.

"That checkers is a draw is not a surprise; grandmaster players have conjectured this for decades."

But no computer program had been able to tackle the game thoroughly.

The researchers said checkers was the most complex game to have been solved - with every possible moved played out -- by a computer. "I think we've raised the bar, and raised it quite a bit, in terms of what can be achieved in computer technology and artificial intelligence," Schaeffer said in a statement.

The board game uses pieces that can move forward one square diagonally and a forced-capture rule.

While many computer programs exist to play games, and can beat humans at such complex games as chess, playing every possible move in a game is a much more difficult problem.