From 2004 apparently. An unapologetically stupid video we created by recording the ad-libbed dialogue first and then acting it out to match what we had said.

Get your weekly dose of SecGov Robots here:

And the usual Phone Guys too:

Plus, this week only, some other thing:

Canada hates the Illiterates. Canada has been at war with the people of Illitria for decades and shows no sign of slowing its genocidal rage. Or something. Whatever.

Anyway, this time we’ve got a confrontation between this one teacher and the school trustees who don’t like how she is teaching the kids to read. This one guy is really upset, so the teacher asks him to read something (“It is from the Bible.”) that his kid had read. But the guy is shamed into admitting he can’t read. One of his fellow trustees is just gleefully pleased about it too. “Why don’t you just READ it then?” he says, just totally sarcasming his ass off. We never really get to see what happens next, because they all turn into a painting, but if they hadn’t I guess we’re expected to assume that he was shown his place and learned to respect the opinions of others who know more about the subject at hand than he does. The other possibility is that he was so embarrassed that he ended up lashing out at everyone in a hateful, and possibly violent, outburst.

For that matter, we’re never told what the teaching methods the trustees had a problem with either. For all I know, that teacher could be a horrible one and the trustees could have been fully justified. “If they read a word incorrectly, I stab their hands so they associate it with pain. When the read a word correctly, I administer the cocaine!” We don’t know. This commercial could be a tragedy.

Four and a Half out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. This Heritage Minute does feel pretty iconic as far as my opinion of the Heritage Minutes is concerned. “Both of you know I cannot read a word” is a good quotable line, though I can’t think of a million places to use it in everyday life. Unless two people are asking you to read something I guess…

I’m now slightly less busy, so I figure I should post some more. And I’ve got the trip to New York to give me, basically, a post for free. But that said, I don’t feel like organizing thoughts coherently just now, so I’m gonna just throw together a list of a bunch of stuff I did with no particular order:

• I was called a dick-head by a guy on a bicycle. I had stepped in front of him, so I was fully in the wrong and deserved to have epithets hurled my way, but “dick-head” seems so elementary school. I ended up just laughing.
• I sat and read in about nine different parks. Because why not. That’s how a PDR should spend his vacation.
• I saw that library from Ghostbusters. We stayed in the bit with the public museum-type exhibition, so I didn’t have to run into that librarian ghost lady. I don’t want to run into her.
• This one squirrel came up to me while I was readin in one of the parks and climbed up onto my arm to see if I had any food for him. When he saw I didn’t, he left.
• I ate from a street vendor who had a sign proclaiming that he served “Breakfast and Food”
• I saw the UN. Again, we stayed in the open museum style part instead of going on tours or anything. It was neat.
• I rode the cable car out to Roosevelt Island. Out there the visitor’s information center had a picture of an old cover of Marvel Team-Up or something where Spider-Man and Nightcrawler fought the Punisher on the cable car. (Or maybe it was just an issue of Spider-Man. I don’t know)
• I saw all week’s episodes of the Daily Show, Colbert, and the Walking Dead on television instead of on the computer internet where I usually see them.
• I went to a bar called The Cannibal. I did not order anything with meat in it. And since they don’t serve juice and I don’t drink, I ordered Coke, which is most likely the first time I’ve had pop since years ago when the old ladies I mowed lawns for would insist I have something more substantial than water.
• I saw the gun that they think killed Abraham Lincoln. Also hair samples from Lincoln, JFK, and Elvis were in the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as well, for all of our cloning needs.
• At the same Ripley’s was this one room called the Black Hole, which has all these lights that mess with your perception and makes you think the room was turning upside down. That was cool. If I could I’d just walk through that room all day trying to get my brain to get a grip on it.
• I saw that museum from that movie where everything comes to life. We spent, I think, more than three hours in that museum and we didn’t see a third of it. It seems pretty sweet.
• I saw that boxing robot movie Real Steel. I was better than I anticipated, though exactly as formulaic as you’d expect. For all its family-friendliness, though, it really did seem to me like that society was a step away from a cyberpunk dystopia. And now I want to make a movie Reel Steal about robots who steel a movie or something.

Anyway, that’s everything I can be bothered to remember just now. There was plenty more, but that’ll have to remain Untold Tales of PDR for now.