Another thrilling installment in my meandering and inconstant series of blog entries about whatever the heck it is that has caught my interest today.

In other words, it’s 10 PM, I need to write something, and I am feeling lazy. So rather than delve into the needless morass of my anger and disappointment at the results of the Canadian election, I decided to leave that off for another day and just pal around a little bit.

There will be plenty of time for me to heap abuse upon the pointy head of Stephen Harper and all his ill-spawned and feculent kin some other time.

First up : Seth Meyers treats us to an extra long (and hence, extra painful) Weekend Update at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Initiating full comedy bitch mode.

Wow, that was painful. Watching that guy absolutely butcher the delivery of jokes he probably wrote himself, jokes that would probably be quite excellent material if he, for instance, was a competent comedian, instead get strangled to death in public view before the world by ill-timed pauses, clumsy pronunciation, focus drift, and a plethora of other comedy crimes. For someone of my own peculiar and specific sensitivities, it’s like being at a violin recital where a very earnest and likeable and clearly nervous performer massacres a very pretty piece of music.

I often wonder if Seth Meyers the head writer of Saturday Night Live ever watches Seth Meyers the Weekend Update anchor on playback and says “No, no you idiot….. you ruined it! That is totally not how I wrote it…. you’re murdering my babies, you hack!”

I kinda hope he does. (Sorry, Seth. You seem like an amazing guy and incredibly cool, but comedy is a precision art form and you are on the most famous comedy show in the world and you’re fucking it up. Art can be a bitch, and so can I. )

And the thing is, you don’t seem to be getting any better. I guess you, too, are part of the culture of mediocrity on SNL, where everyone knows, deep down, that no matter how badly they suck, the show will never be canceled, and so really, why try very hard? After all, if you haven’t been fired, you must be doing a good enough job, right? And hey, the fans don’t know anything, they will be angry at you for not being their favorite cast no matter what you do, so why listen to them?

And the thing is, we all keep clinging to SNL, because hey, it’s bound to get good again sooner or later, right? Sure, it might take a long time, but we will wait, because when it’s good, it’s really good.

And I think you know that too. And every time something decent comes along like Lazy Sunday, the Digital Short that made Andy Samberg famous and briefly kindled the hope that there would be at least one thing each episode that didn’t suck, you burn it out with repetition and overplay and make us wish we had never liked the damn thing in the first place.

It’s not just fannish fussiness and nostalgia talking. You really do suck. You suck and you do not even seem to care. And that sucks even more than the show.

Stopping myself now because I could really go on and on about this forever, there is one bit of science news that I just could not wait till Friday to share.

Scientists at CERN have created a quantity of antimatter that lasted for a staggering 1000 seconds, or 16 minutes and 40 seconds.

No longer solely in the realm of science fiction, antimatter is a substance previously only created for the tiny fraction of time (170 milliseconds) it takes to verify you actually made antimatter, not nearly long enough to study it or do anything cool.

With this new technique, antimatter has finally left the realm of “theoretical particle” and graduated into real, verifiable, testable phenomenon, although one we have to create artificially here in the realm of matter.

Obviously, the problem with creating antimatter and having it hang around long enough to make friends and impress the neighbours is that if a particle of matter hits a particle of antimatter, both are instantly converted into energy, and you have nothing to study any more.

And it is incredibly difficult to get rid of all of the matter in a controlled area. When you realize that literally the tiniest amount of matter possible will wreck the whole thing, you begin to truly grasp what an epic achievement this latest development from CERN truly is.

Next stop : WARP NACELLES!

Feeling like utter crap lately and it’s not hard to figure out why.

The most obvious reason is the fucking election. I won’t go all into it like I did yesterday, but suffice it to say that the prospect of four long years of a Harper majority leaves me filled with dread about Canada’s future as a kind and decent place to live. I am terrified for the future of my beloved nation, as I beleive Harper to truly have bilious contempt for much of what Canadians hold dear about our nation and even those who voted for him in droves will soon come to regret it. He is our enemy and we have made him King.

Another factor in my feeling very bad, mood wise, is the usual spectre of money. Living on $8000 a year just plain sucks, and it’s increasingly clear to me that a lack of funds is a large contributing factor to my depression. It’s not as bad as it could be, but it still leaves me worrying about money all the time and feeling crummy and low and like I can’t truly have any fun or get anywhere in life. Just having to carefully weigh all possible purchases and knowing how much I want that I just plain can’t ever have is a terrible weight on the soul. And it just seems lately like I am always running out of money before the end of the month and I simply cannot live with that kind of financial instability. I need security in order to be happy and I have precious little of it. My lack of finances and my constant worry about it makes me feel small and patghetic and weak and boxed in and bereft.

And I just can’t afford my current sad little lifestyle any more. How depressing is that? My friends and I have a little circuit of three different restaurants that we have dinner out at three times a week, and that, plus my little routine of having some pop and junk food to go with my nightly popcorn habit, has become too damned expensive to maintain lately. My rent has gone up, and I am playing Joe back to the extermination of the bedbugs, and so my tiny window of flexibility has closed and I am squeezed out.

I have been partly bailed out by things like GST cheques lately, but that will end, and what makes it all worse is that I only recently figured out that this is one of those magical, wonderful five week months, where I have to make the same amount of money cover five weeks instead of four.

See, when you’re a worthless drain on society like me, your monthly check is always on the same day, the fourth Wednesday of the month, every month. Sounds fair, right? But such is the nature of the calendar that sometimes, those two fourth Wednesdays are actually five weeks apart instead of four. Fun, hey?

I have no idea how I am going to make it. Well, that’s not true. I have some idea. I just have to summon up the nerve and willpower to either skip one of these three dinners, or go but only have a drink. It will be very hard, because I have a strong urge to do what others are doing and a complementary fear and loathing of sticking out in a group by being the one who says “oh, no thanks!”, and that makes it very hard for me to resist having a meal just like the others, especially when it’s something I want to do as well.

Eating out makes me feel more human and normal and less poor and freaky. It’s probably not the smartest investment of my money, but it really does help. It relieves a key amount of pressure from my tortured cranium and makes me feel less trapped and freakish and miserable. It also, vitally, gives me something to look forward to all the time, and I cannot over-stress how vital that is for maintaining mood.

All this crap has put me in the Bad Place, where I keep thinking about how absolutely pathetic I am, how much my life sucks, and how little I have done with it, and how little I deserve to keep taking up space in the world. I really, really hate myself sometimes, and this is one of those times.

Lately, I just wanna scream and throw myself out a window.

So that’s me. How you doin’?

Feeling extra intellectually sluggish today, so instead of the deep and penetrating slice of illumination I had planned for today’s column, you get the usual Random Whatever I Have Around.

Keep the circuit warm, though. I will go back to trying to be deep soon, honest!

First of all, check out this rather nifty bit of domestic engineering. This picture should give you the basic idea.

Finally, your fish can follow you around the house.

Get it? It’s like a Habitrail setup, but for fish. This guy has built a rather elaborate and extensive aquarium setup which acts like a little “track” by which his fish can swim up, down, and around in a long circuit all through the ground floor of his home. Hence, his fish have the run of the place. For the first time ever, fish can swim around and around in their tank and actually be getting somewhere in the process.

I have never been comfortable imagining myself owning a pet that had to be kept in a cage or a tank, and so I have never considered owning fish. But if I had a setup like that, I think I would feel a lot better about it. Sure, it’s nothing compared to the vast reaches of the mighty Pacific, but it’s not like your average fish covers all that much of the ocean in its lifetime anyhow.

And, to be blunt, it’s not like it will know the difference anyhow.

Next up : OMG, it happened again, and this time, it’s even more awesome.

Yes, it’s another installment of PONIEZ PLUS WEIRD AL, and this time, it’s got EVEN MORE MAGIC.

Because this time, it uses my favorite Weird Al polka mix evar, Angry White Boy Polka!

And the lovely person who does this videos did another absolutely smashing job of syncing the video to not just the music but the lyrics as well, making it look quite a lot like the ponies are singing a Weird Al song.

And that, of course, is completely made of carbon steel plated ultra awesomeness. Combining the ponies and Al is, in fact, such an amazing factorial of awesomeness, such a potent Venn Diagram overlap region of awesome to the power of awesome, that it’s almost painful. It’s like it has so much shiny awesomeness in it that it’s too bright to look at.

Onwards and downwards, we have this gobsmacking bit of incredulous news : the studio doesn’t think there is an audience for a sequel to the Will Ferrell flick ‘Anchorman’.

What is this, I don’t even. Seriously guys? You don’t see sufficient commericial potential in a sequel to a movie that was a critic, audience, and box office smash? A film universally hailed as freaking brilliant and funny as hell even by snobby artsy film school types? A film I expected to hate and ending up being completely seduced, won over, and happily tickled by from start to end? The film, as every with a functional midbrain is pointing out, that launched the movie careers of not only Farrell but Steve Carell and Paul Rudd as well as being perfectly timed to ride the wave of seventies nostalgia?

THAT MOVIE does not get a sequel, but super shitty horror movies that nobody likes does? In this era of the endless recycling of crap, this is where the studios draw the line?

Obviously, what is wrong here is Farrell’s approach. Instead of pitching it as a sequel, he simply should have pitched it as a remake of the original. An “homage”. A “re-imagining”. He should have stressed how a lot of people have a highly profitable vague, warm feeling of recognition when they hear the title of the original but otherwise don’t remember it well enough to notice or care if you change everything about it to conform with the demographic sputum disgorged by the marketing racket.

They would have eaten that shit up with their fingers then licked them clean, man.

What else… there was some little thing in the news lately…. oh yeah, in an upcoming comic, Superman will renounce his United States citizenship.

Just a little thing like that.

He does it because he is tired of everything he does being construed as some kind of extension of United States foreign policy. It’s a bold and courageous move for DC, and extremely timely. He even says “’Truth, justice and the American way’ — it’s not enough anymore,” he says. “The world’s too small, too connected.”, which is a very “now”, very post-millennial way of putting it.

And it makes sense for Supes character-wise as well. He is the ultimate superhero precisely because he has always represented the very highest of ideals, and while those ideals are rooted in the very best of the American spirit, they are far bigger than any nationality. Superman will always be dedicated to doing what is right no matter what, and that’s not something any government can condone or control.

I might even buy the issue in question, and I almost never buy comics any more. I am impressed.

Oh, and one last thing : you should really give this amazing little web experiment a try. Requires HTML5.

This the version I did for my current address.

I could not, as the site suggests, use the address of the house I grew up in, because my home town is so god damned obscure and backwater that not even satellites pay attention to it. You look up the house I grew up in on Google Earth, and all you get is blank white clouds.

Like I didn’t already have an inferiority complex about being from Prince Edward Island, the province that exists purely for the irony of having a province that only has 200,000 people in it. No wonder I have such a finely tuned and heavily muscled sense of the absurd. I come from the second largest town in an absurdly small province in a region that only exists as a bump at the end of the St. Lawrence in a country internationally thought of never internationally thought of.

It’s all pretty freaking fucked up, if you think about it.

And of course, I do.