Whoever the writer thinks should be faster, so as to serve the needs of the story being told.

The EU already has a land border in the Americas. French Guiana is part of the union and it touches Brazil and Suriname. So the gate is already open to work it from the south up instead of the north down.

I read somewhere – great source, I know – that the existing rule is that the country has to be in Europe, though, not that it has a border. Otherwise Malta, Ireland, and Cyprus would not qualify, and the UK too back when they were in.

Oddly enough, the Canadian/Danish border is a questionable one for this purpose anyway – Hans Island (where the border is) is part of Greenland and Greenland is not in the EU. It left in 1985 and is now one of the “Overseas countries and territories” that have special rights in relation to the EU but are not actually in it.

It’s not a precedent – this has already happened several times. John Turner was PM in 1984 without having a seat. Mackenzie King won an election and became PM all while not being an MP in 1926. He was even a seat-less PM for a couple of months again in 1945.

Prior to the convention of standing for election soon after becoming PM being a hard-and-fast thing, John A. McDonald was in a similar position at Confederation in 1867, and so were two more 19th-century PMs, Abbott and Bowell.

Given the way that the Conservatives blew several conventions out of the water last time they were in power (proroguing Parliament inappropriately, and refusing to allow a coalition second crack at forming a government after an election) I agree it would be a good idea to make this a law. But ringing an alarm bell over Carney specifically is a bit too much. The Liberals are already talking about which back-bencher will resign and Carney run: somewhere in the West Island of Montreal looks like a likely candidate as they are super-safe Liberal seats.

They have Kenya listed as an Asian country.

No, they do – it’s just not a codified constitution like almost all other countries have.

Uncodified constitution

Proponents of the idea believe that a constitution that has evolved bit by bit over a long period of time and across a bunch of different charters and unwritten agreements/customs is stronger that one that’s done all in one shot. You’ll see the unflattering metaphor that “a tree is stronger than a weed”, which seems a bit unfair but it’s reasonable point – if not one that’s beyond argument or anything.

Commonwealth countries are politically conservative, small “c” and not big “C”, as the general attitude is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, even if it’s objectively kind of stupid”. There was a good reason for every one of the decisions that led to today, don’t &^%$ with it, just in case.

The key word in “constitutional monarchy” is “constitutional”, not “monarchy”. The monarch must follow the parliament’s requests, and not doing so is unconstitutional. Parliament is sovereign, at least in all of the countries that derive their monarchy from the UK’s.

Outside of the UK there wouldn’t be a fight anyway: in all the Commonwealth countries (except the ones that have since gone fully republican), the monarch has a representative called “the governor general” who is selected by the Parliament and recommended to the monarch at which point see above. The monarch has to take the advice of who is to be their governor-general. Issues basically never get to the monarch for them to mess anything up. The loyal-to-his-country deputy gets first crack at everything the monarch does in theory and has no reason to go against Parliament. If somehow the g-g or the king did speak out, it’d be a legal mess but everyone would ignore them. Practically we’d either get ourselves a new monarch or just say to hell with it and become a republic.

To answer your specific question then, yes, it’s pro forma. The monarch’s role is to be the embodiment of all legislative, judicial, and executive power, in a fairly close analog to what the American Constitution is. But the Constitution can’t exercise any of those powers and the monarch can’t either. It’s just a historical oddity that they can walk and talk, unlike a piece of paper.

Nice find! They had me at “the Devil’s Balls”.

Actual footage of the ice spirits:

Commander Keen is probably the one that I liked the most that is also well known.

My personal favorite was Bass Class, which is weird because I’ve zero interest in real-life fishing, then or now.

The identification depends on how correct Jerome’s rescuers were in thinking his amputations were not completely healed and so were recent. Gamby showed up across the bay four years previous and was missing his legs then.

Well, yes – in the 21st century women should be encouraged to enter traditionally male-dominated fields like excavation and mining.

This sounds like something they’d name an Italian character in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon.

It’s the Daily Mail, so it’s not likely to be, you know…at all like this.

It’s worth noting that “No one had ever traced such a track, as a modern navigator would do” is just wrong. Joseph B. Murdock was with the United States Coast Survey and an instructor at the US Naval Academy and he came up with San Salvador as the landing site at the turn of the 20th century. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison sailed up and down the US’ East Coast in a small boat just for funsies and so knew that kind of navigation as well as anyone; he came up with San Salvador too in the 1930s.

In fact he covered it on the same album! This one went to #1 on the US Charts and “Beyond the Sea (La mer)” went to #10.

Which is hilarious because at this song’s from Three Penny Opera which is critical of capitalism, and its author (though not the creator of the music) was forced to testify in the Hollywood Blacklist sessions of HUAC in 1947 – he left to live in East Germany the day after.

In the case of velocity, all neutrinos move at essentially the speed of light (they have the slightest amount of mass which slows them down, each of the three types of neutrino a different mass compared to the other two but still very, very, extremely low masses). Only neutrinos less than 2 eV are noticeably slower than light, and that’s quite a low energy. The almost-exactly-light-speed has been confirmed by, among other methods, comparing bursts of neutrinos from supernovas and other intense sources to the photons coming from the same sources.

The photons move at the speed of light by definition and MeV and GeV energy neutrinos show up in detectors at the exact same time down to as close as we’ve been able to measure it (roughly one part in a billion, I think it is).

The lands around it being ruled by the Sultan of Swing, no doubt.

Yes, but it doesn’t matter enough. The square-cube law means that the mass being supported goes up faster than the area of the layer doing the supporting does. So each additional brick on the bottom still ends up carrying more weight as the pyramid gets taller.

Depends on the compressive strength of the material. Sooner or later the weight of the pyramid above the base exceeds the base’s ability to support it. Considering that a mountain is basically a stone pyramid, Everest has to be in the neighbourhood of how tall you could go – call it 10-12 kilometers high. Other materials would do better.

I loved that movie especially because his parents in it are duplicates of my parents. I even had a copy of the Bay City Rollers album that had the original version of this song, when I was a kid in a very Scottish immigrant house.