Boxing Day is here again, but lately it seems like the Christmas after Christmas hasn’t been quite as exciting for the shopaholic as in the past:

According to a Visa Canada survey, more than five million Canadians planned to hit the shops on Boxing Day. After electronics, the most sought after item was clothing.

(…)

However, the Visa survey also found the number of Canadians planning to make purchase on Wednesday was 17 per cent less than in 2006, and the lowest number since 2002. Those who do decide to hit the stores are expected to spend less too.

Prowling the RedFlagDeals forums this year reveals much the same story—disappointment at lacklustre sale prices, unstable online shopping experiences, and a growing distaste for huge lines and mob rule at store opening in order to claim hot items available in extremely limited quantities. When 500 people line up outside a store hoping for a crack at 20 HD DVD players, a lot of people are bound to go home disappointed. With the diehard bargain hunters realizing that many of the Boxing Day deals aren’t much better than sale prices from the rest of the year, it looks like for the person in the know there’s really not too much point to braving the crowds and the traffic.

That said, I did pounce on one Boxing Day deal, though it’s actually been available for a couple of days now and involved no lineups, limited quantities or even leaving the house. And assuming I never need to contact Dell’s horrific warranty service for repair, I imagine it really will feel like Christmas when I get my shiny new PS3 in the mail. RedFlagDeals strikes again!

The Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board has commissioned a set of ads about accidents in the workplace. And by all accounts they are fucking horrifying:

One TV spot features an exploding gas canister that blows a construction worker off the side of a building. Another shows a young chef slipping on grease and dumping a vat of boiling water on herself, leaving her writhing on the kitchen floor while her skin peels off in bloody ribbons. The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board says they toned down the actress’s screams in editing because they worried they were too upsetting.

Metafilter has a thread on the subject, and I can’t even bring myself to read the whole thing, let alone actually watch the YouTube videos. Thanks, Ontario government, for giving me ample reason to avoid Canadian television altogether for about four months!

Awesomest bear ever!

There must be another Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie coming out or something, because another American city has completely overreacted to what it thought was a terrorist plot, and is now seeking restitution from the evildoers. Only in this case the “terrorist plot” was sprinkling flour in an Ikea parking lot to mark a running route, and the “evildoers” are two siblings laying the trail for a local beer run club.

Police fielded a call just before 5 p.m. that someone was sprinkling powder on the ground. The store was evacuated and remained closed the rest of the night. The incident prompted a massive response from police in New Haven and surrounding towns.

(…)

Mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said the city plans to seek restitution from the Salchows, who are due in court Sept. 14.

“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”

If you’re one of those people who’ve been avoiding and shit-talking Boston for their incredible lack of common sense regarding the Mooninite sign idiocy, you can now add New Haven to the list of places to avoid at all costs, lest you inherit their particular brand of lunacy.

Colin McRae, legendary rally driver and winner of the 1995 World Rally Championship driver’s title, is dead after a helicopter crash. All that’s left, essentially, is to officially identify the bodies, but McRae was believed to be piloting the helicopter and there were no survivors. Also on board was his five-year-old son and friends of the family, including another child.

In memory, two YouTube clips—one from his long, storied career in the WRC, and a much more recent clip from the X Games. Watch the X Games clip all the way through and you’ll see why McRae is considered one of the top rally drivers ever.

It hasn’t even been two years since the rallying world lost world champ Richard Burns to a brain tumour. The sudden loss of McRae hurts just as much. RIP.

Costco is recalling a line of punching bags with an unusual filling: used underwear. They’re so skeeved out by the bags full of smelly underwear that they’re sending out free shipping boxes AND a replacement punching bag from another company, presumably not filled with used underwear.

Seriously. Used underwear. The mind boggles.

After performing 140 total hours of community service, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens are free from further prosecution in the debacle that was the Aqua Teen Hunger Force campaign/OMG BOMBZ overreaction. And still Boston officials continue to pretend as though they did everything right:

“Today’s hearing in Charlestown hopefully marks the conclusion of the fallout from Cartoon Network’s guerrilla marketing campaign,” Mayor Thomas M. Menino said in a statement. “I hope the message goes out to all guerrilla marketers who plan on doing business in Boston that we take the public safety of those who live and work here very seriously.”

The message is still clear: we were right to overreact, and everyone who thinks otherwise just isn’t vigilant enough. Well, Boston officials may take public safety “very seriously,” but that doesn’t mean I have to take Boston seriously ever again.

Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo.

Update: Here’s the plan. Pretty much what the Globe heard last night. Man, does the map look shiny (yay Spacing!).

The Globe and Mail edition coming out in a couple of hours has the best guess on what the TTC has in store for us when it unveils its new LRT network plan at 10:30am:

…the centrepiece is a $2.2-billion, partly underground line along Eglinton Avenue, from Kingston Road in the east to Pearson Airport in the west….

—An $835-million line along Finch Avenue West, from Highway 427 in Etobicoke to Finch subway station on the Yonge line;
—A $675-million line on Don Mills Road, from Steeles Avenue East to the Bloor subway line;
—A $630-million line on Jane Street;
—A $555-million line from Don Mills Station that runs along Sheppard Avenue East to Morningside;
—A $630-million line on Morningside Avenue that continues onto Kingston Road;
—A $540-million waterfront west line.

Stay tuned.

A dire affliction is spreading throughout the North American honeybee population, and it’s bad enough that the continent’s food supplies may be in danger:

It is swift in its effect. Over the course of a week the majority of the bees in an affected colony will flee the hive and disappear, going off to die elsewhere. The few remaining insects are then found to be enormously diseased - they have a “tremendous pathogen load”, the scientists say. But why? No one yet knows.

The mysterious syndrome has an official name: colony collapse disorder. Europe is beginning to see similar signs of bee population decreases, and while some theories have been suggested as to the problem’s cause—unseen side effects of agricultural pesticides, for one—the emergency working panel convened to study the population collapse has no concrete answers. Colony collapse disorder is a recent phenomenon, with colony declines first occurring last fall; as a result, many states are still measuring the full impact of the losses, with some beekeepers reporting losses of up to 50% and others up to 95%. With the numbers all over the place and the cause uncertain, colony collapse disorder could be a major problem this year for parts of the agricultural industry that rely heavily on honeybee pollination.