Those who know Halifax will know the Commons, a pleasant park-area-deal just minutes from my apartment. It’s a nice place. In the Commons there’s this fountain that, for no actually justifiable reason, I have been referring to as “my fountain” for years. Sometimes I like to relax by sitting near it.

Anyway, three times this year I have seen teen-agers urinating in the bushes around my fountain. Unmitigated savagery. Now I don’t like to mock people who go to the washroom a lot or anything. I know that not everyone has the superhuman bladder that I have and I just don’t know what it is like to need to pee that badly. I can’t relate. But here is the thing: There is a washroom in the Commons! They just built a whole building to hold toilets and such right there in the park it a couple years ago! It’s PLAINLY VISIBLE from the area where the fountain is. If these teen-agers are unable to walk a distance that takes less than a minute because their bladders are so useless, maybe they shouldn’t leave the house. Or at least invest in some device that allows for one to avoid the need for public urination. On MY fountain!

What is the world coming to?

In other news, when I woke up this morning I remembered the dream I’d had so I wrote about it to Marq. Now I’ll copy and paste that here to fill up the rest of this post: I had a dream where I wasn’t me, I was some woman who worked in a hospital. Then a non-specific apocalypse happened and I, and at least three other hospital workers all became undead (we called ourselves zombies, but we had no zombie-mindlessness or cravings) and we kept the hospital open for survivors who needed help (there were many). At some point a woman who looked a lot like me came in to the hospital and it turned out it was on of my ancestors who happened to be a vampire. We got caught up and she didn’t drink my blood because I was dead. Then she had to leave town for whatever reason.

And let me add something I forgot to mention in that account: There was a point where I was totally jamming my wrist in the face of my vampire ancestor to see if she could smell the blood. She couldn’t.

Well, we have a space for advertising on the Book of PDR now. Over in the sidebar, under the menu, I’m sure you can see it. I had resisted doing such a thing because it is sort of ridiculous, but now I’ve done it anyway. Isn’t that a great story? It sure is. The bottom line is that it would be cool to make any amount of money, no matter how small, from this website, seeing as it is one of the main things I enjoy in life. It may be a long while before you actually see any ad there, though, since I don’t get a lot of hits to this site and people probably prefer to advertise in places that do.

Haiku!

In a world of pie.
One man must learn about love
And eat all the pie.

Here’s a terrible idea for a video game: The alien bad guys are summoning their armies through a Star Portal Machine that you destroy in the first level. After that you just have to kill the hordes that have already made it through, so there is constantly fewer dudes. As the levels go on they just keep getting easier and easier because there isn’t many bad guys left. The final level is just you leading an army against the one alien left who is just scared and hiding. It’ll be easy, but think of the sense of power you’d get. You’d be like, a really terrible guy!

What’s in a name? That’s the sort of question that arises when you watch the Canadian Propaganda Piece I am reviewing this time around.

So this one starts out with some people (Europeans) walking until they are next to some other people (North American Natives, I would assume in Canada what with that being the point). So the Natives speak in some weird gibberish code* and the Head European asks his friendly neighborhood priest to translate. The priest informs the Head European that the Natives have invited them to the nation and it is called “Canada” and, yes, that’s right, this commercial is about the secret origin of Canada’s name. Anyway, everyone is happy to know the name of the nation except one guy: He’s not the priest and he’s not the Head European, so basically we don’t know who he is. We just have to imagine. Probably he’s the ship’s carpeter.

* I am 1/256 Wampanoag, so I am allowed to make this joke. (It’s my only race card, let me play it!)

Anyway this guy is so sick of putting down carpet on the ship that when a chance to show off comes up he is All Over It. Basically he’s like “I know that word! That’s not the name of the nation! The old man is just talking about the village down there!” but the priest stands by his translation and Canada is called Canada forever after.

Once again I’m sure that what we are seeing here is not an actual event that played out. Yes the name Canada likely comes from the word for village in some language (and I feel somewhat ashamed that I don’t know which), but it is a safe bet that the Pedant vs. Priest argument we see unfold here was made up solely for our benefit. And I am totally okay with that! This one has several lines I like to quote and would be easily recognized by others who grew up in the right era. Job well done!

I also like the music throughout this piece. It ramps up the drama of the whole affair, which is good considering this is a commercial where one group of people invite some other people in to talk and the closest thing we have to a conflict is a disagreement over what a word means. Not exactly a drama-explosion no matter how many . So the music plays throughout to keep emotions from dying. In a way it reminds me of the Irish Kids moment and my mind will try to tack on the upbeat jig from that one. Really, if they ended all of these with a jig there’d be a lot more happy endings.

Anyway, as I said, I do like this one. I’m going to give it Four and a Half out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.

In other news, the comments section of YouTube is, as always, filled with idiotic arguments, in this case about how evil Whitey is for conquering the natives. Now I didn’t stray too far into the comments (I am a human being and we can only take so many YouTube comments), but I didn’t see any discussion of the real scandal in here: Note that the religious man is proven wrong and just flat out denies it. This commercial is CLEARLY trying A) to depict religious persons as stubborn and foolish, or B) Show that God intervened to make sure that Canada got the right name. That is obviously what people on the Internet need to be arguing about. (Edit: I’ve linked to an official video since the original post, so I don’t know/care if that argument is still in the comments)