The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Outside the house: the sun’s starting to set.

Inside the house: dinner’s almost done.

The scene this morning at Spadina subway station.
Photo by Antonio Gomez-Palacio (@aurbanist). Click to to see the original.

The TTC has announced that all trains are back up and running. Get moving, Toronto working stiffs! Be advised that there will still be some “residual delays”.

This article was originally titled Toronto friends: The subways are down, expect a terrible morning commute. The original body appears below.

Toronto’s public transit system — the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) — has announced that the radio system and even the backup radio system used to communicate with the subway trains is out of commission. Without working communications, they decided to shut down the trains until the problem is resolved. If you live in Toronto, you might want to hold off your commute and keep an eye on the official TTC Twitter account. Remember that even if you drive to work, a subway outage means terrible traffic on the streets (and Tampa folks, our terrible transit system, coupled with urban non-engineering is why our traffic is terrible).

…it’s grocery shopping day for me and Anitra. This is a photo of me earlier this morning at Bearss Groves, our local year-round open-air fruit and vegetable market, hefting a watermelon that weighs about as much as my big accordion.

Found via AcidCow. Click the photo to see the source.

This part from issue number one of the new Groot comic book starts off with a scene that we’re all familiar with…

…and here’s where it takes a left turn:

Found via The Brandon Show.

Her transformation from Bruce to Caitlyn isn’t going to harm you (no matter what Fox News says), but the police’s transformation from constabulary to paramilitary just might.

The Vatican recently announced that Pope Francis will deliver an encyclical — a letter covering some aspect of Catholic doctrine, and the second highest-ranking kind of document a present-day Pope can produce — on the environment, anthropogenic climate change, and the moral issue of good planetary stewardship. Some people, like those at Yale University’s Forum on Religion and Ecology, are pleased. Others, most notable super-conservative (and namesake of the icky aftermath of certain sex acts) Rick Santorum is less so.

Here’s what Santorum said in a recent interview on a Philadelphia radio station:

The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science. We probably are better off leaving science to the scientists, and focusing on what we’re really good at, which is theology and morality.

When we get involved with controversial and scientific theories, I think the Church is not as forceful and not as credible. I’ve said this to the Catholic bishops many times — when they get involved in agriculture policy, or things like that, that are really outside of the scope of what the Church’s main message is, that we’re better off sticking to the things that are really the core teachings of the Church as opposed to getting involved in every other kind of issue that happens to be popular at the time.

While he’s right that the church has often been wrong on science, Santorum’s “leave science to the scientists” stance rings more than a little false given that his party tends to resist science in the most ridiculous ways. Remember, they recently voted to prevent scientists from advising the Environmental Protection Agency on their own environmental research.

It also ignores the fact that Pope Francis, neé Jorge Bergoglio, has a master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires, and that other members of the Catholic clergy, most notably the Jesuits, have a long history of significantly contributing to science and mathematics.

Santorum’s real problem with the encyclical isn’t that the Pope is straying into areas where he’s not qualified, but that he’s straying into areas where Santorum doesn’t want him.

Read: Santorum Wants The Pope To Back Off Talking About Climate Science