Blog Posts by Jordana Divon

How tough are Massachusetts dogs? So tough their K-9 compatriots shoot firearms on the job.

Of course that’s not exactly how things went down over the weekend in Lawrence, Mass., a town 30 miles north of every single Ben Affleck movie ever made (except for Argo. That one was a little further away). But like Argo, a little embellishment makes for a much better opener.

What actually happened, as the Eagle-Tribune reports, is that a local officer on duty heard a trio of gunshots at around 2 a.m. on Saturday. He raced to the nearby scene and witnessed three suspects peel off in a getaway car that unfortunately did not look like this.

[ Related: Dog shoots Florida man ]

The officer called for backup and started to chase the vehicle o’ suspects, which “fled at a high rate of

Pugs on a sled. And that’s pretty much it.

But I’m contractually obligated to come up with at least 150 words per post, so after a bit of deep investigative journalism that required extensive research, I learned that these are no ordinary pugs stuffed into human winter clothing and pulled along a snowy surface in a plastic tub.

Oh no. This quartet of cuteness is better known by its professional moniker: “The Fabulous Pug Models,” which could probably be stretched to meet some vague reference to The Fabulous Baker Boys, but actually that’s just me trying to get closer to 150 words.

[ Related: Get a tissue: Montage of pooches sneezing ]

Individually, these pugs each have names that sound like they came straight out of a Henry James novel about New England debutantes in the late 19th century. Clara Francis, Gretta Rose, Oliver James (no relation to Henry) and Riley Steven are the oft-photographed stars of PugsAndKisses.com, a website that only the most charbroiled of hearts could resist.

What makes for the perfect surfing experience? Is it a steady supply of clean waves? Watching the sun peek out from behind the mountains after a beautiful barrel ride? How about getting caught in an epic chase between a pod of transient killer whales and their sea lion prey?

That last scenario happened to describe the morning of a dozen lucky surfers near the Tofino, B.C. coast last Friday – lucky because most were smart enough to hightail it of the way before they became accidental Jonahs and also because it’s not everyone who gets a chance to witness nature at its most spectacular.

[ Related: Humpback whale scares paddlers with love tap ]

Video footage captured by Adam Chilton, a local videographer upon whom fortune was smiling down that day, shows the orcas surfacing around 150 metres from the shore in pursuit of a group of sea lions.

Also in the video: a group of surfers paddling to shore once they caught a glimpse of the scene unfolding behind them.

“It was a pleasant surprise,

Your favourite celebrity has never struck you as possessing a nut-shaped cranium, but that could be because you just never bothered to take it there.

Except now that you’ve been introduced to the concept, just try to wipe it from your consciousness. Exactly. You can’t. Heads will now forever be a congregation of walnuts, almonds and pecans.

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But some skulls are more naturally nut-like than others, so what do you do when you just can’t place the family of pistachios to which your boss's head belongs?

Thankfully, artist Steve Casino has done all the handiwork for us, spending countless hours painting famous people onto peanut shells. This is what he does and he’s brilliant at it.

Before you dismiss this as a waste of otherwise spectacular hand-eye coordination, take a look at the results. They’re incredible. Elton John, Wonder Woman, James Brown – your entire 1970s cultural experience has been re-imagined as food.

Plus,

Forget expensive therapy. People looking for a release to their internal anger just need to pack up their worldly belongings, head to Scandinavia and join the Finland Screaming Men’s Choir.

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Of course, there are a few conditions. For starters, you need to be a man. A predilection for shouting, coupled with a healthy lung capacity, should probably figure among your next considerations. A working knowledge of Finnish can’t hurt either, and if you want to get front and centre during performances, like the guy at the 1:59 mark in the YouTube video, it helps to have a spectacular beard not seen in such glorious fashion since the last Idomo commercial aired in Canada.

But while the novelty factor looms loud, there’s a far more interesting background to the Oulo, Finland-based group.

Founder and director Petri Sirvio, a character in his own right, leads the 30-man group in anywhere between five and eight tours per

Darrell and Laurie Szczerba won the Lotto Max $30 million jackpot.

It’s moments like winning a $30-million lottery windfall that really make you re-evaluate your priorities.

Darrell Szczerba’s schedule started out pretty clear last Saturday. The Calgary man was sitting in the Smiling Buddha tattoo parlour waiting to get some fresh ink on his leg.

As he waited for his appointment, the veteran construction worker decided to step across the street to a nearby convenience store.

“It was crazy, I had a half hour to kill before my appointment, so I went to the gas station to check my tickets and get a cold drink,” Szczerba told reporters at a press conference last week. “I didn’t get that drink.”

He may not have gotten that drink but he can have as many cold drinks as he likes for the rest of his life served on a jewel-encrusted platter, because Szczerba happened to be holding on to the biggest winning lottery ticket in Calgary’s history.

[ Related: Quebec lottery says 'no' to gambling on pope's successor ]

That’s when the priority shift kicked in. The

File this one away in the “KIDS, DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME” folder.

A 17-year-old student from Albuquerque, New Mexico, thought he’d try to lob a snowball at his buddy in front of him. So far so good, right? Right.

Except the teens were on a ski chairlift more than 45 feet in the air, and when Teen #1 raised his arm to peg Teen #2, the momentum from the throw caused him to slip from the chair and dangle precariously off the bottom while hanging on for dear life.

The incident occurred Feb. 2 at Ski Santa Fe atop the area’s highest lift, the ominously named Millennium Triple Chair.

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Because sometimes there’s nothing to do in the face of impending doom except film it on your smartphone camera, an 18-second video clip shows the boy lose his grip and plummet to the snowy ground below.

And while he won’t be winning any Boy Scout badges for survival instincts, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports that the boy miraculously survived and is now

The Prince has a long history of cracking the sorts of jokes that end up making headlines.Leave it to Prince Philip, everyone’s completely inappropriate old uncle, to stick his foot in it once again.

Britain’s 91-year-old multicultural ambassador was on a tour of the new cardiac centre at Luton & Dunstable Hospital in Bedfordshire, when he turned to a nurse of Filipino extraction and said: "The Philippines must be half-empty – you're all here running the NHS."

The Independent notes that he punctuated this impromptu comedy hour by joking that he was the world’s “most experienced curtain puller” and asked when the hospital would be receiving a helipad to spare him the inconvenience of visiting by car.

Fans of the royal card are used to this sort of humour by now, as the Prince has a long history of cracking the sorts of jokes that end up making headlines.

[ Related: Cringe-worthy quotes from Prince Philip ]

Take this infamous quip, for example. During an official tour of China in 1986, Queen Elizabeth’s other half turned to a British student studying in Beijing and said: "If