April 14, 2020

April 14th is the 105th day of the year. There are 261 days remaining until the end of the year.

The Municipality of Chatham-Kent has set up a drop off site to gather personal protective equipment (PPE) for front line health care workers.

Thames Campus Arena is open for the public to leave their donations of medical masks, gloves, face shields, goggles, and medical gowns.

Some offices have masks that are desperately needed.

The drop off station will open Wednesday, April 15th from 10-2:30 and the plan is to operate the site at that time each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Donors can bring their donations inside the main front doors of the arena, place them on the table in the ticket area and exit the building for social distancing. Donations must be dropped inside the building.

The provincial legislature meets later today and Premier Doug Ford has indicated that orders under the Emergency Act may be extended another 28 days.

He says it’s too early to say if school closures will be extended beyond May 4th.

On Saturday, the province extended the Emergency Act until at least April 23rd, currently the provincial government can only extend the State of Emergency by 14 days. They’ll discuss a 28 day extension this morning.

A group of high school students in Calgary created a free hotline to help cheer up seniors who are stuck in isolation.

It’s got pre-recorded jokes and uplifting messages from kids. The number is 1-877-JOY-4ALL.

A team just took advantage of the nearly empty streets in the U.S. to break the Cannonball Run record.

They drove from New York to Los Angeles in 26 hours and 38 minutes. That beats the record set in November by more than 45 minutes.

They drove a white 2019 Audi A8 with a pair of red plastic marine fuel tanks ratchet-strapped into its trunk. They started at the Red Ball Garage in New York City at 11:15 pm on April 4, and ended less than 27 hours later at the Portofino Hotel & Marina in Redondo Beach, California, the traditional start and end points of a Cannonball attempt.

Less traffic = faster driving. One weird effect of coronavirus? The Cannonball Run record, from New York to LA, just fell below 27 hours and may fall again and again. “It’s like having an American autobahn.” My zippy weekend read for you: https://t.co/9n36n7Z4GL

— John Branch (@JohnBranchNYT) April 11, 2020

 Have you ever wanted to name a colour? Do you think you could come up with something better than Crayola?

There’s a new project that’s crowdsourcing names for all 16.8 million colours in the red-green-blue colour spectrum, which is what we use on the Internet.

If you go to ColorNames.org, you can pick colours to name, or they’ll assign you random ones. As long as the name is, “descriptive and non-offensive,” it becomes official.

Categorised in: 5 Things You Need To Know

This post was written by Chris McLeod