Something I’ve seen many times over the years over the years on television and the Internet is people saying that talking about one’s dreams makes one a bore. Basically what it all boils down to is the message that “Yeah, dreams are weird, we get it.” Well I hate to go against television and the Internet, but I am here to say that I totally like hearing about dreams. I often like hearing about dreams more than I like hearing about actual things that have happened to people.

Maybe somehow the complainers have just been so overwhelmed by descriptions of dreams that it has grown tiresome, but as someone who doesn’t do a whole lot of talking to people (and talking about dreams makes up such a small, small portion of that talking) this is not a problem for me. I love the surreality of dreams so much that my own occasionally remembered dreams are not enough to fill my interest. Hearing about good strangeness from the subconsciousnesses of others is the only way I can think to fill the void.

I’m not, however, one of those people who likes analyzing what the “symbols” in dreams mean. My dreams are typically so bizarre that I have doubt that any such meaning is in there. Plus, the oddness is what I like most about the dreams, so why ruin it?

With this in mind I’m going to repost something from the Contains2 era. Though the dream in question happened years earlier, I had discussed it often enough that the details were still fresh in my mind on Saturday 22 of June 2002 when I posted this:

The OJ Simpson Bus-Boat Dream

Okay, I had this dream once, years ago (I think it was in grade ten, so whichever year that was). I’ve had myself a lot of strange dreams (and it seems like 75% of them are set in malls, is there some sort of symbolism behind that?) but this dream is up there in it’s not being surreal, not just being wacky. I’ve told it to many people, and now I’m going to write it up here to prevent me from forgetting even more of it than I already have.

I don’t think it actually started at this point, but this is where my memories kick in:

I’m in my own house, and I’m a butler. I’m going through my various duties and I happen to look out my window. Just as it does in the real world the window has a view of the Atlantic Ocean. Out there, driving on the ocean at the horizon is a bus, which I immediately recognize as the OJ Simpson Bus-Boat. Not finding this at all strange, I go back to work.

But when I look out the window again, I see that the Bus-Boat has changed course. It’s heading directly for my house! I dive away from the window, and I hear the Bus-Boat crashing onto the area in front of my house.

Things get blurry right here again, but I think I talked to my parents for a few minutes about the Bus-Boat having crashed in front of our house. When my memory comes clear again…

A panoramic, birds-eye-view of the Bus-Boat (now that it is on land it’s a boat. A military ship actually, maybe even a carrier) as it is cordoned off by military personnel and helicopters circle it (military or media? I couldn’t tell you). It’s about the size that such a boat would really be, and takes up the length of my street (Himmelman Drive, Boy!). In the real world, the road is curved, but the boat manages just fine.

Things get blurry again and then me and a guy who I knew from school at the time are disguising ourselves as water deliverymen to sneak into the Bus-Boat. I don’t know what happened inside, but when we came out I had found a secret device: An Electric Arm!

I don’t think my memory is blurry here, I think the dream just skipped scenes and suddenly I was wearing the Electric Arm and leading a team of commandos or mercenaries or something. We’re fighting this ogre and he’s got us cornered on a winding staircase that has a big brass pole at its center. The ogre repeatedly charges at us and I hold him off by hitting him with the Electric Arm. Each time I strike the ogre numbers fly out of him and he moves back. Eventually we’re at the top of the stairs and the ogre is at the bottom resting against the brass pole. Brilliantly, I use my Electric Arm on the pole, sending a shock down and forcing the ogre to run away.

I think the dream went on, but that is all I can still remember. For a dream I had like six years ago, I think that’s pretty good. (Wow! I don’t even think I did the math wrong, I think it really has been six years since grade ten.)
If there is any meaning behind that dream, I certainly don’t get it.

No, this post is not a farewell to Inspector Gadget’s resourceful niece. I’ll never say goodbye to her because she was a good role model for girls of my generation who will hopefully be remembered forever. Also, she’s fictional, so my saying goodbye would be ridiculous.

This post is about how Canada is now in the process of phasing out the penny. I assume that everyone is so interested in what my thoughts are on the topic that they would lose sleep AND lose consciousness if I don’t discuss immediately. So here goes:

So Canada is finally getting rid of the penny, eh? Well, I’m for it. I’ve already lived through the Canadian Dollar Bill and Two Dollar Bill being turned into the Loonie and the Toonie respectively, so I’m an old pro at this whole, monetary changes thing. I’ve been getting used to changes in money for years. You might even say I’ve CASHED OUT of this situation before, if you really didn’t care enough to think of a proper joke.* So I’m confident that the populace of The Houses, The Village will surely adapt quickly and the unneeded unit will be a fondly remembered part of our past, but not missed.

And good riddance. Speaking as someone with a tendency to carry a lot of change in his coat pocket, I can say that pennies add up faster in being a space-wasting nuisance than they add up in monetary value. And I might be sad if we were losing a coin that had an animal or boat on it, but it’s just the maple leaf. We’ve got that on tons of other stuff, so we won’t miss it. It’ll still be with us. Also, copper is supposed to be a really valuable resource isn’t it? People actually break into buildings to steal wires and stuff its so valuable. Well, now we’re gonna have way more copper that we aren’t wasting. That’ll help. We’ll have more resources to use on more important things.

So sleep well, people, knowing that PDR approves of the phasing out of the Canadian penny. And on top of it all, even though the logic-using parts of my brain know it isn’t remotely true, I can still tell the substantial rest of my brain that we’re getting a step closer to my dream of one day living in a world without money. Hooray!

* I really don’t care about making a better joke. Not worth the effort.

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.

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.

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.