Here’s something PDR did a little work on:

X-MEN: EARTH’S MUTANT HEROES #1

All things mutants take center stage in this all-new collection of Handbook-style profiles! Featuring X-Men members (Madison Jeffries/Box, Paulie Provenzano, Wraith/Hector Rendoza), trainees (Onyxx, Ink/Eric Gitter), allies (Fred Duncan, Tom Corsi, Candy Southern, Shortpack), the evil (Cortex, X-Cutioner, Amelia Voght, Zaladane, Black Womb) and the lesser-known (Litterbug, Jazz, Arize, Jack in the Box, Crule), and updates for the big guns (Professor X, Magneto, Emma Frost, Beast, Mystique). And because you demanded it: Joseph gets a profile at last! Plus: brand-new Gus Vazquez art for the majority of profiles! 64 PGS. /Handbook/Rated T+ …$4.99 In Stores: May 25, 2011

For years now I’ve done the bulk of my watching television at the Comedy Network website. Home to the Daily Show and Colbert (because in Canada we’re not allowed to watch those shows on their actual websites). For years the Comedy Network website has been pretty crappy.

The video system had always been sub-YouTube in quality. I spent as much time with buffering and waiting for the clips to load as I actually did watching. Even if I were to pause the clip and walk away from the computer for a while it would only load up a minute ahead of where I was paused and just stop. If I let it load for an hour while I did other things, I’d would come back to a minute’s worth of a clip and then more waiting. And at least twice a day the clips would just give up and kick me out of the video thing and would not only stop loading the clip, it would also lose the place where it was. Combine this with the problems my computer has anyway, it made watching my stories unnecessarily large.

Well today I woke up to find a new type of clip viewer on the site. And today, no long waits and stuff. I guess I have to thank the Comedy Network. If you’re going to force me to watch the shows on your site instead of those of the actual people whose shows I want to see, I’m glad you seem to actually be making it easier for me.

SIDEBURNS! The single most important aspect of this Canadian Heritage Minute is the sideburns. Ostensibly it is about Jenny Trout, who was the first woman licensed to practice medicine in Canada and the hassles she had to put up with in medical school from all the men who felt that women had no place there. I mean sure, it is good that women can be doctors and whatnot, but check out the sideburns! Especially on the Doctor McFarland guy. Those are things of beauty. I also love the idea of smacking desks and books as a means of showing disapproval. It’s so stupid that I could never take it seriously.

But the failing of this commercial is that it just doesn’t have any great quotable lines. There’s just nothing there that is fun to say. I do have to wonder about the one guy in the class who gets the most face time the others. Why does she throw the leaf at that one guy? Does she know that the camera has featured him more prominently? Is he like the boss of the misogynist students? Does he have some history with Mrs. Trout? There’s potential here for a deeper story. If only these commercials had sequels we could find out what happens when he tried to assassinate Trout only to get thrown out a window. And then she’d say “There’s no place for dumbasses in this school!” Now that’s quotable history.

Also, it occurs to me that there is totally a picture of a penis in this commercial. I can’t remember ever laughing about that as a child. Was I not immature enough? I wonder if they’re still allowed to air that. I’ve heard that they aren’t even allowed to show Homer Simpson’s butt in new episodes, but that’s America so who knows.

Anyway, I’m only giving this one Three out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. And most of that is for those sideburns.

Two Secret Government Robots pages today because I want to get into the story quicker.

And as usual, some guys on some phones.

Yesterday, Saturday, I was awakened after only a three hours sleep by two telemarketing-type calls. This was around Nine and Nine Thirty in the morning. I thought that even normal Day People liked to sleep in on Saturday mornings. Is that not too early for them to be calling? It completely messed me up in any case.

I did enjoy some of my unfortunate waking hours watching two discs worth of episodes of the sixth season of the Simpsons and it is nice to be reminded of just how awesome that show was back when it was awesome. It is hard to believe that those episodes were like a decade and a half old now. Seriously, they should be feeding that stuff to the new kids growing up today. By force if necessary.

And now, because I can, here’s a story:

There was an astronaut called Deke Manly who was always getting drunk and getting in fights with horses. Eventually none of the horses in town would even let him get close to them. The scientists who he worked with didn’t know about his drunken horsefighting, so when they happened to notice that, no matter what, horses would not come within twenty feet of Deke, they naturally assumed that Deke had some sort of horse-repelling field. As it turned out some horses had stolen a spaceship back in ’79 and colonized a planet where they were now massing their forces to return to Earth as conquerors. The scientists shot Deke into space and landed him on the Horse Planet figuring this would put the Horse Armies into disarray. Deke had no horse repelling field, so instead the horses just arrested him and threatened to kill him if Earth didn’t surrender. Earth didn’t surrender. For his last request Deke was given some booze and got so drunk that he had no problem taking on all the Horse colonists. After he’d clobbered all the Horses he didn’t know how to get home, so he brought all the Horses to the hospital and helped them get back to full health. Then they were all friends and the Horse Invasion of Earth was called off and Deke was finally cured of his drunken tendency to fight horses. The end.