Things I learned lately 11 December

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  The past weeks of excess rainfall and flooding, resulting in flooded farms, homes and washed out highways, may be the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history.
• Crimbo is British slang for Christmas.
• Cats cannot project into the future because their frontal lobes are not developed. Cats can't make long-term plans. Some people think that when they leave the house, and their cat does something nasty, it's so the person has a nasty experience. Cats do not have the ability to plan ahead in this way.
• Churchill Manitoba, on the shores of Hudsons Bay,  has no road access from the rest of the province. Everything has to come in by rail or plane.
• There are no chain stores, restaurants or hotels in Churchill, MB. Every retail store is a local business.
• In an experiment in Estonia, instead of getting a speeding ticket, drivers who are caught exceeding the limit have to stop and wait for a 'time out' to pass before they can continue their journey.
• The oldest doors still in use in Rome, can be found at the Pantheon. Cast in bronze for Emperor Hadrian's rebuilding, it dates from about 115 AD. Each door is solid bronze, measures 2.3 m wide and 7.5 m high (not feet, metres!), yet so well balanced they can be pushed or pulled open easily by one person.
• Vilnius has put up a statue that offers a “portal” to the polish city of Lublin, allowing people to see each other in real time.
• Tesco in Slovakia opened with empty shelves. They wanted to show their customers how it would look like if all bees and butterflies would become extinct.
• In Wroclaw, Poland each cathedral and even the rivers have a tactile model nearby for blind people to see them too.
• 20 years ago, the Mayor of Amsterdam married 4 gay couples as the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage.