It’s Thursday again already! Holy snakes, that week seemed to snap on past. I know I say that a lot, but gosh darn it, it just keeps being true. Some day I have to find the shutter speed setting on my own personal private reality and turn that sucker way way down.

Of course, sleeping too much doesn’t help, although lately my problem has been the opposite. I seem to have hit the part of my cycle where I have trouble sleeping at all, and when I do sleep, it is shallow and brief and I don’t feel a heck of a lot different when I wake up.

But oh well. At least during these phases, I feel fairly good most of the time. A little mentally overstrained and perhaps a little on edge (DON’T YOU FUCKING TOUCH THAT, ARRRRRRRGH! Just kidding. ) but fairly upbeat, positive, and energetic.

Maybe that means I am hypomanic right now but I prefer to think of this as a preview of what I would be like without the depression hanging around my neck like an anchor. I have it in me to be a much more positive and dynamic fellow if I can just find that part of myself and hook it in to the main power.

Nobody can tell you’re bright if you are too shy to shine, baby!

Anyhow, on to the links.

I like this pic because of the sheer elegance of design.

Remember, this is only as Freudian as your mind is dirty!

I have seen other watermelon infusion methods that involve tubing and pumps and complex arrangements of ice and buckets and even evaporative cooling. That is great if you are an engineer and love designing complex ways to solve simple problems, or a med student with a lot of neato tubing and stuff just lying around, but true elegance of design lies in simplicity, and therein lies the genius.

Just cut a hole, insert the bottle, and let gravity and capillary action do all the work. The watermelon will absorb the alcohol at a natural rate, and you will know the process is complete when the bottle is empty. What could be simpler?

My only concern is that I hope that is just brown rum, not spiced rum. As nuts as I am for spiced rum, and for watermelon for that matter, I can’t imagine the two working well together.

And of course, if it was me doing it, that would be some Absolut all up in that melon. But I am a vodka lover, so I am way biased.

Next up, we have one that has become a big, big hit amongst us in the grammar elite.

Boy syrup, in the blue bottle!

Presumably, the real name is “Oh Boy! Syrup”. But some genius in graphic design correctly thought that the label design would look more balances with the exclamation point up higher, but incorrectly thought that it would not make a difference to how the thing reads.

So now the product is “Oh! Boy Syrup”, as if we has just stumbled across some boy syrup by happy accident and now we have something to put on that short stack of boys we have every morning for breakfast.

There are other possible ideas as to where “boy syrup” comes from, but I shan’t elaborate.

Next up we have this radically viral clip making the lefty leaning political sphere these days, of the future (and current) President of Ireland giving some Tea Party schmuck the what-for, and doing it in round resonant ringing tones to boot.

Note : it’s from the radio, so don’t expect the picture to change.

Personally, while I do think he said a lot of things that need to be said to these barbaric oafs, I thinh the clip mostly went viral because he said them in that magnificent educated Irish accent. There are a lot of centuries of excellence in oratory in the cultural DNA of that clips and that man, Michael D. Higgins, marvelous speaking voices. I particularly like the way that accent flows so well for punching the key words of your speech and really getting the passionate conviction going without slowing down the flow of your argument one bit.

Of course, it is probably mostly making the rounds because he calls this Tea Party dumbfuck a “wanker”, and that is a word that always makes North Americans giggle.

Frankly, they would all be better off if they did more wanking themselves and less wanking with the world.

Finally, a link to a book I hope to get eventually, Crafty Television Writing.

I have wanted to write for television ever since I was a little television loving kid and suddenly realized “Wait a minute… someone WRITES all this stuff!”

Of course, really, there is only one question I want answered clearly, directly, and definitively for once : how the hell do you get into the game?

Nobody in the biz seems to want to answer that one, and I suspect it is because they do not want other people to find their secret path into the promised land and thus provide more competition.

That might just be vicious jealousy and paranoia talking, though. A lot of the television writers seem to have gotten their jobs by accident, which is a wonderful message to us hopefuls. Basically it says “There is literally no hope that anyone can deliberately get this job. You would have more luck playing the lottery, because like a thousand people a year win one of those somewhere and there is only about two hundred people who get to write all TV shows in the world, and they will never die. ”

Again, that is probably the jealousy thing talking again. I am glad that I do not live in LA, or I would probably end up banging my fist on the door of the writer’s room of The Simpsons shouting “Let me in! YOu have to let me do this! I belong here! I’m Canadian! We’re funny! LET ME IIIIIIN!”.

And then the security and the tazing and the darkness and the jail.

But they would have a funny anecdote to tell!