Yeah, I know “smorgasbord” has some of those O’s with the slash through them. But I am too lazy to look up the alt codes to put them in, OK?

Anyhow, Facebook hath rained down many riches today, and so it is time I git me to sharing them!

First off, an amusing story from Australia of a seventeen year old boy pretending to be a doctor.

And apparently, they never got Doogie Howser MD down in Australia, because they reference Catch Me If You Can and even Doctor Who (??) but there is no mention of the Doogster.

Anyhoo, seems this mysterious boy has been dressing up in scrubs and a stethoscope and roaming the halls of various Australian hospitals looking at charts and even prescribed drugs to one 12 year old girl, which is very wrong in at least two obvious ways.

Sounds like an interesting young fellow. I am hoping that he just really, really, really wants to be a doctor some day and is doing this out of an excess of zeal, and that he will make a very good doctor someday and this is just a little overabundance of enthusiasm in an otherwise good kid.

That would certainly make a better story than some asshole just seeing what he can get away with.

Then there’s this hilarious example of American logic : in response to a killer nanny who killed two kids in her care, New York City moms are looking to hiring female Navy SEALS as nannies.

Sure, that makes sense. Why have your children killed by an amateur when you have them more efficiently killed by a professional? That;s the way to protect your kid from killer nannies… hire only nannies trained in the are of killing!

That is such an American way of handling something that it is almost adorable. No matter the problem, Americans cannot grasp any solution that does not involve more force.

That is why, in movies, they can never believe that shooting the monster will not work. Shoot it! Did it work? No, it’s still alive. Then… shoot it more! No? Well, have you tried shooting it? Look, shooting always works! Just keep shooting!

I am sure there is a point about the NRA to be made there, but forget it.

Then there is this clip. It has been around forever, but I figured I would throw it in today just for the heck of it.

This is when you completely abandon all sanity and turn the awesome up to eleven.

I really want to meet the guy who wrote that script, because holy shit dude, you have taken it to the next level times ten. It makes anything Michael Bay has squeezed out of his brain sphincter look like My Dinner With Andre : Unplugged.

Hey, if you are going to go crazy, go all the fucking way. That’s my motto.

Then there’s this intriguing bit of technology :

The final product looks pretty awful, honestly, and not my idea of Christmas Dinner at all. They should just be up front and say it’s stew. I like stew. If they called it “Christmas Dinner Stew”, and it turned out like that, I would not be disappointed or surprised.

As is… eww. Still, I am intrigued by the self-heating can technology. It is one of those things that has been promised by science fiction since the 40’s but it never quite seems to be invented in a way that catches on outside army surplus and camping supply stores.

I suspect the problem is safety. Heating stuff up via some chemical reaction is easy enough, but doing it in a way that is not too dangerous to be released upon a world full of idiots is not so easy.

Still, I bet that stuff is fantastic for camping.

To continue our arcade of video clips, here we have Walter Cronkite (I so want there to be a mineral called Waltercronkite, one that is very stable and reliable) introducing us to the home office of the future as imagined in 1967.

Isn’t retro futurism fun? I get the feeling we can learn a lot about humility in our own predictions from looking at visions of the future past.

Anyhow, what really strikes me about that clip is just how old the dream of telecommuting is, and just how ridiculous the idea that “some day we will all work from home” has been this whole time.

Not everybody has an office job, you know. A lot of people have jobs doing actual, physical things.

And there is a lot to be said for being in the same room with people. We have had the technology for widespread telecommuting for at least a decade now, and yet it is still fairly rare.

Maybe because it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth?

And finally, it has been a while since I gave you all a dose of WTF Japan, and this video should fix that right up for ya.

Waddy Fug, man.

OK, technically, this might not be Japanese in origin. Sure, the instructor is a Japanese girl with a Japanese name, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the whole thing is Japanese.

But what the hell, let’s pin it on them anyhow. WTF, Japan? Seriously.

Now obviously, this video is completely insane. You know that when you first see this check with the clearly fake Popeye arms. But what is driving me crazy is, how the heck did they do the poodle… things?

Because there are clearly actual, live poodles involved somehow. At least, the heads seem to be those of actual dogs. Yet just as clearly, the rest of the poodle… things are people. No dog could be trained to move like that.

And yet, the poodle… things are clearly shorter than our no doubt petite Japanese lady. This suggests to me the frightening possibility that what we are seeing is children in poodle costumes with live poodles on their shoulders, doing the exercises I assume by rote or by audio clues or both.

It could also be some sort of video compositing, but if so, it’s done seamlessly.

Taken as a whole, it has the air of the product of the singular vision of a borderline personality disorder Japanese lady with rich parents and a disturbingly childlike view of the world.

I hope the dogs are OK.