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.