News for Youse: Port Moody man takes PNE prize home, turns it into dirty bachelor pad, Vancouver is Canada’s greenest city, and LOOKOUT! TERRORISTS!

If you haven't had time to read the morning papers or watch the news, here are some things you can discuss around the office water cooler:

Oh, what a rollercoaster it’s been for Vancouverites in the last 24 hours, especially for Darren MacDonald, a Port Moody man who won the PNE’s prize home yesterday. The 3,100 square foot craftsman’s home comes with its own theatre, and a whole bunch of other rooms that MacDonald will never see because he’s 28 years old and has no kids.

MacDonald also took a $2,500 grocery package from Market Place IGA, or more accurately, MacDonald won $2,500 worth of Wavy Lays and Gnutella. On the downside, the house will eventually be moved to Kelowna. Second prize this year is two houses in Kelowna (as the old joke goes).

Anyway, sorry, in other rollercoaster news, Canada’s unemployment rate is up from 7.2 to 7.3 percent.

"I would look at it as a part of this process of adjustment to a slower growth trajectory in North America and around the world and it highlights the increasing uncertainty by businesses towards the job market,” said Scotiabank’s deputy chief economist and interim special task force leader in charge of never using the word “recession” around a reporter, Aron Gampel.

On the upside, those geographical whiz kids at the Economist Intelligence Unit along with partners Siemens have awarded Vancouver with its much coveted greenest city in Canada nod, thanks to our “superior air quality”—which you can actually view from the Island ferry as a thick and ominous band of orange-grey smog obscuring the skyline like a blanket of slow, suffocating death.

Vancouver kicked ass in eight of the nine categories used to determine “greeniness”, but Cowtown pipped us for “water conservation and infrastructure.” The Intelligence Unit, which downgraded our livability score last month because of a highway that isn’t here, noted that our water infrastructure was badly compromised by the concrete channel directing the LA River from Canoga Park to Long Beach.

Are you sick to death of 9/11 yet? Don’t be. President Hope-nosis spoke terrifyingly today of a "credible but unconfirmed" threat to New York City and Washington DC in the run up to the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Reuters actually drummed up over 650 words on this silliness, so here’s the abridged version:

U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity said that uncorroborated intelligence reports of a possible attack by some shady group with possible links to al Qaeda might blow some shit up but almost certainly won’t, prompting Mayor Bloomberg to comment, “Over the next three days we should all keep our eyes wide open."

Which all sounds like as good a reason as any for the US government to loudly and publicly assume an “enhanced… security posture.” How kinky!