I would say that it is very likely I would have no idea what an inukshuk was if it wasn’t for this commercial. Maybe they told us in school one time, but I sure don’t remember it. This commercial on the other hand can not be forgotten. I’m pretty sure this commercial was designed by Canadologists to maximize its ability to bore into the minds of the public. And for this, I love this Heritage Moment.

What we’ve got here is a wounded RCMP officer and some Inuit people, right. They’re taking a break or something and the Inuit, as they are wont to do, start building an inukshuk. RCMP Johnny says to himself “I’ve always wondered what those things were about” and he goes to check it out. The woman doesn’t even need to be asked, though. She knows that people all the time be thinking about inukshuks, so as soon as he gets there she has another guy (her son maybe) translate the purpose of the thing: “Now the People will know we were here.”

And is our only great quotable line from this one. But it’s a great one. They even have to bring it back mere seconds later to close out the piece. It probably wasn’t written that way. I’m pretty sure it just had to happen that way because the line was so quotable. So while it only gives us one line, it’s so well done, I give big points for it. Of the Heritage Moments I’ve reviewed so far, only the Superman can honestly trump this one, because it has both quality and quantity.

But meanwhile, we’ve got the hidden non-educational bit of the story. What is the deal here? How did this RCMPoliceman get hurt? Just a simple slip and fall on an icy rock? Was he attacked by Americans trying to get to the Yukon? Did he sprain his ankle giving a roundhouse kick to the a wendigo? We don’t know. It raises questions and I, for one, would enjoy seeing the tale of these people (a family, probably) helping this guy get wherever they’re going. A television show really ought to have sprung from this.

For doing its job super well and giving us tantalizing hints at a story at the same time, this one gets Five out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.

When I was in New York last year, I saw an inukshuk on display at the United Nations building. I’m no nationalist, but that moment made me feel connected to Canada even more than finding a Tim Hortons in a pizza hut did.

Just these two guys on phones today:

This is gonna be pointless, so don’t bear with me. Yeah, don’t. Just ignore this.

So, two weeks ago, while cutting my fingernails, I missed my left ring fingernail, right? I noticed a few hours later, or even the next day, but I figured “Screw it, I’ll cut it next weekend” and just let it be. By the end of that week I was actually looking forward to cutting my nails again to get it all synched up. So then I did. Fascinating, no? But anyway, I realized later that this is the same finger which I got caught in a machine at work a few years back and had the nail completely pulled out. It took months for it to grow back. So now, in the course of my life, I’ve cut this one specific fingernail probably a half-dozen fewer times than all my other ones. And now this fact is on the Internet! Hooray for technology!

Haiku!

See the golden fog.
See how it rolls over there.
Fooled you! It’s not there.

Yeah, I don’t actually have much to say. I kinda messed up my sleeping habits over the last couple weeks, so now I’m up in the daytime trying to right it. But I’m spending the time trying to get a ton of SecGovs done so I have a nice comfortable buffer. We’ll see how I do.

Back when Geocities decided to commit suicide and take all our hard work with it, I lamented the death of my first website, the Adam West Batcave, but I’m just remembering something else that Geocities took too. I had once created a website devoted to telling the world that Patrick D Ryall sucks.

I think I called the site “geocities.com/pdrsucks/” and on it I wrote from the point of view of a person who supposedly knew me in school and had an intense distaste for me. I’m pretty sure I only got a few paragraphs of insane ranting done, but I had always planned to get back to it. Unfortunately, as time passed, I forgot about it. It likely would have come back to me at some point, but then I forgot about it when it mattered most, at the end of the Geocities era. When I got everything from the Batcave, I forgot to get to pdrsucks and save what I had done. I could have transferred it to some blog somewhere or something. So now all that is lost. I never linked to the site anywhere, because it wasn’t finished, so I doubt it exists in any cache online anywhere. It is lost to the ages.

I remember I told Kiiip about it as I was doing it, but I never told Marq. In fact, the entire reason I was building a site about how much I suck was because I hoped, someday, it would get into search engines Marq would stumble across it and be amazed. But now that will never happen…

So anyway, Marq, now you know. Maybe my finally telling you this could be considered your birthday gift since I got you zero ones for your actual birthday last weekend?

Here’s some thing I drew while watching things:

You see, they stopped talking so that she could take their order and she misunderstood it. If I explain it hard enough, maybe it’ll justify its existence.

And, of course, we have the Phone Guys:

I guess it must be colder for the Phone Guys than it is in the real world. This Winter ain’t had nothin’ on me.