geekosystem

For most of the world, today is just another stinking Monday, but in Canada it's Music Monday -- a day to help the Coalition for Music Education celebrate music education in schools. To do that, they're having rock star astronaut Chris Hadfield perform with an expected 600,000 Canadian children live from space at 12 PM EDT. You can watch the live stream and sing along right here, even if you are not Canadian or a child. Go ahead, we won't tell.

Depending on your feelings when it comes to the oft-maligned poutine, the traditionally Canadian dish of french fries and cheese curds topped with brown gravy, this next bit of news could go one way or the other: Jones Soda is officially bringing a limited edition poutine-flavored soda to market. If that's just too much for you, take solace in the fact that it's only coming to Canada. For now.

It looks like if Canada has just decided if they have anything interesting to announce, they're just going to let Chris Hadfield do it from space. I'm prepared to say this is the right call, because let's face it -- dude kills. Case in point: Yesterday saw Hadfield introduce the world to the new Canadian five dollar bill, a piece of currency notable for featuring the first ever image of a space robot to grace cold hard cash.

Everything you know may be wrong. You grew up assuming that camels originated in the Middle East, right? Or maybe Africa or Asia, like the two-humped Bactrian? Since that no longer seems to be the case, what else were your teachers lying about? You see, evidence has been found that giant, prehistoric camels lived in the Arctic circle and this just might be where our even-toed, arid-dwelling friends came from.

In what will most likely be the most Canadian thing you see today, unless there's a Degrassi marathon on tonight, here's a video of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield playing a song with the Barenaked Ladies, the most celebrated Canadian alt rock band of the mid-90's, and the Canadian show choir national champions the Wexford Gleeks. The song is titled "I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)" and it was commisioned by CBCMusic.ca and The Coalition for Music Education with the Canadian Space Agency to focus on music education in Canada.

Contrary to your very safe assumptions, the Windsor Hum is not a well-regarded shoegaze band. It is not a deviant sex act practiced exclusively on the frozen tundra of Canada. And not, it's not the plaintive wail of the Yeti across the lonesome plains. Okay, actually it might be that last thing -- we don't really know. The Canadian government is aiming to find the source of the mysterious "Windsor Hum," an unexplained sound plaguing Windsor, Ontario that is slowly driving residents of the city insane. Okay, well, maybe not insance, but it's definitely irking them.

Canada recently revamped its $20 bill, resulting in an uproar from Canadian botanists upset that the bills seem to have whiffed on a pretty big point -- Canada's iconic symbol, the maple leaf. While a maple leaf did make it onto the bill, tree and plant aficionados from across the country have noted with some dismay that it doesn't appear to be a leaf from the sugar maple that it represented on Canada's flags and hockey jerseys, but one from the Norway maple, a species that, as its name suggests, isn't even native to Canada.

Ever been to a Tim Hortons a few hours before closing time? Things can get real seedy real quick within the seemingly innocuous restaurant. Among a list of other things to be wary of after 9:00 pm, running into a gang of rowdy geriatrics singing Disney tunes is definitely not a situation you'd want to find yourself in, especially if you're alone. Whoever captured this footage from a Tim Hortons in Canada was fortunate to get away from the rambunctious bunch  -- terrorizing palpably distressed patrons with their rendition of Elton John's "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" from The Lion King -- with their life and camera. All we want to know is, why wasn't anybody calling the police?

The borders to our Canadian cousins are so close, and yet we tend to do things oh so differently. You see, in the United States, it's frowned upon to reek of the processed and entirely unnatural fast food we tend to scoff down on a regular basis. A scarlet letter indicative of a poor diet and even poorer hygiene, if you will. Canada, on the other hand, views the musk of such edible delights as a badge of honor and mark of loyalty for one's restaurant chain of choice. To reward such unwavering devotion, Pizza Hut Canada handed out bottles of Eau de Pizza Hut -- a pizza-scented perfume -- to 110 lucky Facebook fans after reaching a momentous 100,000 likes on their fan page.

Oh, humanity, you're a real piece of work. When we're not callously wiping out an entire species of animal through overhunting or habitat destruction, it turns out we're scaring the living daylights out of them. During a year-long study of elk in southwestern Alberta, a research party led by Simone Ciuti from the University of Alberta noticed that the presence of humans left the elk more on edge than the presence of their natural predators, like bears and wolves. The elk seemed particularly put off by humans in vehicles, though it seems fair to assume that bears and wolves driving ATVs would have left them equally unnerved.

Yesterday, the rumor about a Wii Mini hitting stores next month made the rounds, and today it's been confirmed. The Wii Mini will be released on December 7th, but only in Canada. The unnamed source from yesterday turned out to be Best Buy Canada, and we found the hot little item on Nintendo's site as well. So get ready, Canada, for a smaller, less-featured version of a system you probably already own. Oh, also it's red. So, there's that.

A 24-year-old Canadian man has been arrested after walking along the route of Kingston, Ontario's Santa Claus Day Parade telling children that there was no such thing as Santa Claus. Unsurprisingly, the man -- who police described as "having his hair formed to look like horns that were protruding from his head" -- was drunk, and also in violation of his probation, which is still no good excuse for being a jagweed of this caliber.

Today, just when the plight of snack cake lovers across the United States looked most bleak, a beacon of light shone down upon us from the North, where Canada has become the surprising savoir of all Twinkie-dom. The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian brands that own the licenses for Hostess products in Canada will continue producing Twinkies, Ho Hos, and Ding Dongs, even as suppliers in the United States shutter their doors. Though Hostess may be dead, the Twinkie lives on.

Everybody, meet Xenoceratops foremostensis, a brand new species of ceratopsid, or horned dinosaur, discovered in the plentiful fossil beds of Canada. Weighing in at 2 tons and about 20 feet long, Xenoceratops -- meaning "alien-horned face" -- lived about 80 million years ago, making it one of the oldest big-bodied horned dinosaurs known to paleontologists.

Have you ever wondered what a pig would look like if you turned it into a centimeters thick living carpet of writhing underwater scavengers? Wonder no more, thanks to the latest work from forensic scientists at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. In an effort to better understand how human corpses decompose in seawater, the research team placed a pig carcass  -- the most accurate, though least flattering, analog for human decomposition -- in a cage in the nearby Salish Sea to see how it would fare. It took a colony of sea lice just 4 days to colonize the corpse inside and out, reducing it to a pile of bones.