So, I’ve got this big cookie that was wrapped in saran-wrap style stuff when I got it, right? So I eat about half of it and try to wrap the remains up for tomorrow and the wrap doesn’t fit anymore. What the chunks is up with that? There’s less cookie for it to cover now than it did a few minutes ago and it can’t make it. Sometimes the world just doesn’t make sense. I’m assuming this has to do with aliens somehow.

Haiku!

Damage the balloon!
We have to cause it some harm
or it will harm us.

Marq ain’t got no Internet. Sometimes things are downright inconvenient. Still, from what I understand Marq’s updating of This Very Website is coming along well and it shouldn’t be long before we’ve got a new design and hopefully a new method of displaying the comics and stuff. Certainly my current method of big pages with all the images isn’t the nicest mode. While 2011 has certainly been my most productive year on my Book of PDR, I’m hoping 2012 could continue the trend.

Also, I ain’t got no money. It’s kind of annoying. It makes buying things more difficult, that’s for sure. I think, realistically, I’m going to have to move to a cheaper apartment in the new year. That sucks. I’ve been here for, like, seven or eight years. Sure, a two bedroom is more than I need, but I’m attached to it. Plus, moving is a pain in the neck. But that’s the price I guess I have to pay for not having money. Because not having money proves that I don’t deserve my apartment.

UPDATE: Like half an hour later. So anyway, as anyone who knows me well can attest, I have serious neuroses about food going bad. Because that thin layer of saran wrap couldn’t contain that cookie I felt like I had to eat it all now and now I’m all like “ooooogghhh, I feel gross and cookie-filled” and now I also don’t have any cookie for tomorrow. It’s not easy being PDR

So, I have seen articles in the newspapers that lead me to indicate that the Simpsons will be drawing to an end. This is an event which has been a long time coming, but will still be of note because back in my formative years that was The Show for PDR. For more than a decade that was the show that taught me how to realize stupidity in the world around me and laugh at it. I own the DVDs of those first ten seasons or so and I never tire of rewatching them. Sure, I stopped relating to the show eventually, but with a decade-long run of amusing me, I can’t complain. So now that it is wrapping up… wait, what’s that? Oh, the article says there could still be two or three years? What is with this show? Stop it already.

For the record the first article I saw on the topic had a headline telling viewers now to “have a cow” so I am going to choose to believe that they have had that headline ready for about twenty years and were just waiting for the opportunity to use it.

I have also seen articles on the Internet telling me that a new season of Arrested Development is going to happen. That right there, is awesome times news.

There’s some song that’s all like “All you little pigs doin’ kung fu flips better run, better run, up jump tha boogie” but those might not really be the words but I don’t care. Anyway, I heard it a couple times. It was in Fright Night and then I heard it on the radio. That’s the whole story. I just wanted my version of the lyrics on the Internet.

Haiku!

People need more time
or they’ll never get it done.
They can’t move that fast.

Speaking of songs I botch the lyrics to, I’m pretty sure that Return to Innocence by Enigma has become the song I sing most often in the shower, replacing Runaway by Del Shannon (though I technically sing the Me First and the Gimme Gimmes version tempo-wise). The difference is that I know the words to Runaway, but with my new song I just try to do the chanting. Now you all know more about my showering times. Your Welcome!

I was just browsing the Onion, as is my wont, and I got a message saying I’d used up my monthly allowance of five pages and that I had to subscribe to keep reading. Naturally, with this being the Onion, I assumed it was kidding, but no. Apparently non-American readers are now being expected to pay for seeing the Onion website.

Now, don’t get me wrong, as a loyal fan of the Onion for more than a decade I am willing to pay them for entertaining me. The makers of the Onion very much deserve to be paid well for entertaining us every week and I do doubt this is just some greedy whim of theirs, they probably need the additional income because they aren’t making enough off of advertising and stuff. I own six of their books (I own Our Dumb Century twice even) and have many times over the years paid for print editions of the paper, but those are things I can buy when I have the money around. I don’t plan on paying for a subscription to the website so, Onion, I’m afraid I won’t be seeing as much as you anymore. You will be missed.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I have to use the Comedy Network website to watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report because, residing as I do in Canada, the sites that actually belong to the show are blocked here. Now, this annoys me in all kinds of ways: Whenever someone on the Internet links to a clip from one of those shows, they’re gonna link to the real sites, so I can pretty much never follow a link discussing the content. And even if I were bother to try to find the same clip on the Comedy Network site, their library is very much incomplete. There is no way at all for me to go back to the clips from way back in like 2000 or whenever when Colbert/Carell gave us amazing gold all the time. And also sometimes they seem to delay putting up the previous night’s shows for hours after the normal time

But I’m used to that. I’ve had to put up with that all the time. But what really bugs me is the way that the player on the Comedy Network doesn’t seem very good. It always takes a long time to load, but I’m willing to assume that that is in part the fault of my computer (though I rarely have that problem with things like YouTube…), and plus, for all I know the same problem would occur on the actual sites, so I can’t complain. But these last couple days the Comedy Network site has been even worse, often resetting every forty seconds making it pretty much impossible to watch the shows. And I know this time that it isn’t my laptop’s fault.

So, what I’m getting to here, is, if anyone ever scans the Internet looking for opinions on this, I want to be allowed to use the Daily Show and Colbert sites in Canada. C’mon, Comedy Network. If you’re going to make it illegal for me to watch the shows on their actual websites, can’t you at least try to not suck so bad?

In other news, I was awakened by the sound of jackhammering outside today. So that sucked.

“They keep coming up with these stupid computer things. There should be one damn computer thing, that’s it!”
– Robert Freeman

So now I’m on Google Plus. I remember when Facebook was new, people kept using it and I didn’t bother joining up. Then I joined up and now I like it. I don’t do much with it. I can send messages to people in a more efficient form than my email and I can play Scrabble and also there’s a program where I can keep track of books as I read them that’s pretty neat. I have no problem with Facebook. But some people do. They wanted something different so now Google Plus happened. I probably wouldn’t have joined, but Kiiip sent me an invite so I figured, why not?

And now I’m on two different social media things. I was never on the Myspace or the Twitter. I feel like it’s going to get all complicated and I’ll have to start putting more mental effort into it and that’s going to cause social anxiety. Like real life! And if computer-type socializing starts becoming as bad for me as real-life socializing? What then? What’s the point? Argh.

Ah well. I’m on there now, so we’ll see what happens.

Over this last week I have purchased seven DVDs from Blockbuster locations that are dying here in Halifax. Now, I love my DVD collection and its extensiveness, (as shown in this here not even up-to-date list) so I am quite pleased to be adding to it for the first time in quite a while.

That said, with every DVD I add to the collection I also add to my annoyance, because I know I shouldn’t have a DVD collection at all. At the place where human technological development is, there is simply no need for it. Ideally all the movies (and music and so on) would be kept in a vast repository online where we could all see the movies we want, when we want. These physical copies of the movies that I so enjoy are entirely pointless. And yet I still like them. It’s rough being a greatly self-contradictory fellow.

Of course, when DVDs are finally an obsolete technology, this collection is going to seem like a lot of wasted time and effort.

(For the record, I’ve just realized that one of my new seven DVDs is Fullscreen. I didn’t even know they still had those.)

Kiiip and I went out to see Paul this weekend and I shall now comment on that: I thought the movie was pretty good. It does not stand up in my head with Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, but it amused me and that’s what matters.

Haiku!

Suppose the bears come
and we’re all unprepared.
What will we do then?

Here’s a thing: I don’t like mayonnaise. I do love cucumber sandwiches and wraps. I don’t know how to make a cucumber sandwich without mayo. It’s a complicated problem. What else do people use to make sandwiches? Butter? No way. Mustard? I do like mustard, but I don’t think it’d work with cucumber. Just the act of putting the mayo on the bread (or tortilla usually) is unappealing to me and I always end up with bits of it on my fingers. Usually if I get food on my fingers while preparing it, I can like it off, but with mayo it is just annoying.

Why am I ranting about mayonnaise? Because I ate a cucumber wrap while writing this, that’s why. Now the Internet knows.

I just went roughly two days without the Internet being allowed into my home. Seems I did not have enough money in the bank when the provider tried to take the money out of the bank. A couple times. Like since January. So they cut me off. But it is all taken care of now, so I am back online and I will start making sure that I am keeping more money in my bank account, I think.

It’s weird how if I were to go away for a weekend or something I would not notice the lack of Internet. I mean, it’s only two days. That is really not very long. But when I am in my home and I am having nothing better to do and I have had several days of way-too-long shifts at work this week, when that happens, I notice the lack of Internet. After all. It’s Two Whole Days! That’s forever!

I’m pretty much all caught up on what I missed. I’ve two episodes of each of the Daily Show and Colbert that I am about to watch. And I had to clear about 900 spam comments from the site here. I suppose that could have been worse considering that I’ve had that many turn up in a matter of hours sometimes.

So, going back as far as the old Geocities site, I have been linking to this one site where clicking on these icons they’ve got is supposed to help raise some money for some worthy causes. Apparently a bit of money actually does go to those causes, so I keep clicking. I think there was only three or four causes back when I started, but just the other day I noticed a new one, for helping homeless veterans. It seems like with this new edition it is as good a time as any to comment on something which has been bothering me for a while.

When you click on a cause’s icon it, as with any website in this day and age, shows how many people have “liked” it on Facebook. Each cause apparently having its own Facebook page, they each have their own numbers of “likers” and the numbers for each cause goes as follows:

Hunger: 67,871
Breast Cancer: 409,396
Animals: 368,019
Veterans: 4,765
Child Health: 24,292
Literacy: 24,626
Rainforest: 36,122

Okay, Breast Cancer is winning. I am not really surprised by that. For some reason breast cancer “awareness” has been a thing people have been concerned with for forever. Obviously I’m not pro-breast cancer or even cancer in general, but I’m going to complain about raising “awareness” for things that probably nobody is unaware of at this point. But here’s the thing: Apparently it worked. Almost half a million Facebookers bothered to like that page on the site (which actually sends money toward mammograms rather than just raising awareness, for the record). I mean, excepting the Animals one, the other causes don’t add up that high combines. People are aware.

Veterans comes in last place, but hey, it’s only a few days old. Next to last? Child Health and Literacy. I really would have thought that a lot of the people who would bother “liking” the page for Animals would also “like” the Children one. They’re both cute, aren’t they? And, just from my point of view, I would think that improving the health and literacy of our children would go a long way towards not only fighting breast cancer, but a lot of other problems by raising a generation well equipped to deal with them. I say we get some “Raise Better Kids Awareness” campaigns going maybe and try our hands at making a difference at it.

Of course, in reality it is entirely likely that people who “liked” the pages on Facebook just “liked” one as a means of “liking” the group, or even just “liked” one because somebody sent them a link and they’ve never even bothered going to the page. Basically, it isn’t a highly scientific way of me getting my informations, but hey, I’m just brainstorming here. Lemme alone.