Another day of the long dark tunnel of sleep. Lots of dreams and shit. Ho hum, just another day in the strange and exotic landscape of my mind.

Nothing wrong with me that getting a life would not fix.

I am working on it.

For instance, ordered the ice cream maker that I had my heart set on yesterday. It is a Cuisinart Pure Indulgence, and I am super excited about it.

What can I say? I adore toys that make food.

And I mean, come on! I love love love ice cream. It is like my favorite dessert ever, and even if I was not diabetic, the prospect of making it myself would have enormous appeal. When I used to be a frequent visitor to the Ideal Dairy Ice Cream Parlor in my hometown of Summerside, Prince Edward Island, I would always look at all the flavours and choose my favorites ^[1] and ponder what sort of flavours I would concoct if I was the guy who owned the dairy and ran the ice cream parlor.

Well, now I will be able to fulfill my dream and experiment to my heart’s content. I have the feeling I will be buying some mint extract in the very near future, and maybe even get some sugar free chocolate syrup online, so I can make my own version of my favorite all time ice cream flavour, Chocolate Mint Medallion, a sadly transient flavour from Baskin Robbins.

Nothing fancy, just mint ice cream with chocolate sauce rippled through it, but man o man, that stuff did something amazing and wonderful to my brain. Pretty much anything with chocolate and mint together in it will do it, but Chocolate Mint Medallion did it best.

Sad but true : a month later I was back at same Baskin Robbins, eagerly anticipating a repeat, and they had never heard of the stuff. The cone jockey acted like I had decided to just make up a flavour and ask her if she had it just to make her life harder. I was placed in the absurd, Kafka like position of having to argue for the very existence, in the past if not in the present, of the product in question. Nobody at the store had even heard of it, apparently.

That is Falling Down level bullshit. The little things that can drive a person completely nuts if it happens enough. Reality issues.

I mean, you really have to wonder what kind of a world we live in when you realized that even the Mister Rogers for a whole generation of nerds was, in face, kind of a dick.

Yup. Mister Wizard was a real asshole.

Actually, I am sure that he was a very nice man and these clips are in no way representative of what he was really liked as a host or as a person.

Or maybe he really was a raging arsehole who hated children. I don’t know. He was a little before my time. I vaguely recall him being on PBS when I was very very young, and being a little scared of him, but then again, at that age, I was a little afraid of Big Bird, so that is no indication.

Still, compared to the mega sunny, super positive, pro social, pro self-esteem shows that I grew up on, like Sesame Street, he does come off as a little angry.

I think, ironically enough, that the idea was that this was funny, that a grownup would act like a petulant child sometimes. Perhaps they even thought this would make him more identifiable and less of an imposing authority figure for kids.

And that probably worked for kids with authoritarian parents and from the right era. But me, I really wanted adults to be respectable authority figures on whom I could rely, and they just were not. So Mister Wizard would have just greatly upset me. An adult who acts like the mean kids who pick on me?

Just shoot me now.

Luckily, I had Mister Dressup, who was every Canadian child’s sweet, patient uncle, and the Friendly Giant, who was weird but he had animals who played music.

And later on, my science show was Newton’s Apple with Ira Flatow, and he was never angry, childish, or mean.

And then came Bill Nye The Science Guy, who was wacky and hilarious (to a kid) and his show was all hyperkinetic and hyperactive and awesome. The perfect thing for a mentally hyperactive kid like I was.

Hyperactive like the Thomas Dolby Song.

Is that one amazingly 80’s video or what? One of my all time faves.

Another thing that has been on my mind lately is this news story about a massive showdown between the Big Six publishers and Amazon.com.

Basically, Amazon wants to jack up what it charges publishers to put stuff out for the Kindle by as much as 30 times, and the Big Six (who must own like eighty percent of all the books in the world) are, understandably, not willing to sign up for that kind of ass raping.

I have been asking myself what the fuck Amazon is thinking playing chicken with the big dogs of publishing. They must me truly inhaling their own exhaust and thinking that in the future, nobody will buy books any more and the only way to sell a book will be on the Kindle. So they can ask for whatever the fuck they want, because they have a monopoly on the future.

That is clearly delusional. Traditional publishing might be dying, but it is not dead yet, and the Bix Six can do without Amazon (there are lots of other readers, after all) a lot more easily than Amazon can do without the Big Six, without whom presumably the Kindle buyers would have nothing to read.

But I think that is the future of the world of media. The big dogs will turn on each other like trapped rats as the media pie shrinks.

I just hope there is still room for those of us what string the words together in the first place once all the dinosaurs have killed each other off.

Just call me a mammal, I guess.