Located at the corner of 5th St & Hennepin Ave S in Minneapolis, this 5-story mural was completed by by Brasilian artist Eduardo Kobra and crew.

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The life in this monastery is characterized by prayer, reading, and labor. Not a bad day if you get to drink Chimay Ale, which has been made at this Trappist monastery since 1862.

The brothers use the profits from the operation to support their monastery and surrounding charities.

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This house, originally built in 1902, has 22 rooms, four fireplaces and 5 chandeliers- but the main feature is the dungeon in the basement.

Purchased by Stu Hart in 1951, the amateur wrestler and promoter turned the basement of the house into a wrestling training center. The Hart Family Dungeon became the center of Stampede Wrestling (Stu's wrestling company) and a legendary wrestling school.

The house was sold by the remaining Hart siblings after Stu's death in 2003, and it was declared a municipal heritage site by the city of Calgary in 2012.

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Although many aspects of its history seem to be obscured, Malaga Island was the site of a mixed-race community from the Civil War until their forced expulsion in 1912.

The black and white settlers had formed a fishing village with a school on the island, and they lived peacefully for 50 years until the state of Maine purchased the island in 1911.

The idea of a mixed community was at odds with the prevailing eugenics theory of the area, and local and state politicians used the Malaga Island community as a wedge issue.

Eight settlers were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. The remaining 45 residents were evicted from the island, their school was moved to a different island, and Malaga Island's graveyard was dug up and redeposited on the mainland.

Source: Malaga Island: A Story Best Left Untold radio documentary and Strange Fruit, Volume I graphic novel by Joel Christian Gill

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Located at this address in sunny Calgary, Canada, is the Transcanada Corp office.

Transcanada is the brain trust that is shoving the XL Keystone pipeline down America's throat via an insecure Congress desperate to prove that they can get something- no matter how ill-conceived and unbeneficial to Americans- done.

The US $12.2 billion project is set to bring tar sands oil from Alberta that is rich in sulfur and other tasty stuff to the only shit pot in North America that will process it- Houston, TX.

But what about the jobs created? The number of actual jobs gets hyper-inflated with the zealousness of the proponent, but a recent Forbes article shows that Transcanada's own applications state they expect (on the top end) only 6,000-6,500 short term jobs created for the complete construction and approximately 35 full time jobs once it's online.

In comparison, Amazon.com is hiring 80,000 short term jobs for the holiday season (view source here).

We, the energy thirsty masses, get to bear the brunt of increased air pollution from the processing and the risk of leaks, contamination, and spills that a 1,200 mile (1,900 km) pipeline brings.

But environmental disasters related to industrial energy use rarely occur, unless you count the Gulf BP oil spill, or the Exxon Valdez, or the Fukushima nuclear power plant, or Chernobyl, or Three-Mile-Island or this rather long and depressing list of recent oil spills.

And then there’s that whole global warming thing that we didn’t get to talk about...

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