Good morning everyone, I’m glad you could all make it to the presentation. Let me give you all the basic agenda of what’s going to happen.

For the first ten minutes or so, we’re going to be busy getting the projector working for the PowerPoint slideshow. It’s quite likely no one in this room knows how to get it working, even though all of us have seen tech support come in and get it working hundreds of times; therefore, we will again be calling tech support.

Once the projector is working, I’m going to spend a few minutes passing out a printout of the slideshow to each person individually. I simply don’t trust you all enough to hand the stack to one person and have it passed around while I’m talking. The astute members of the audience will read through the printout before I even begin speaking and safely ignore the actual speech while thinking about what they could be doing instead of sitting here.

I will begin the actual presentation with an overview slide going over each of the topics I will cover. A good percentage of you will glance over the slide, determine none of it is relevant or interesting, and drift off into a non-attentive stupor while I drone on. The rest of you won’t even be paying attention since I will be going over each of the bullet points in great detail as soon as I’m finished with this waste of a slide and time.

For the rest of the presentation, I will not look toward you at all. I never actually practiced the speech, so I will be looking directly at the projection on the wall. As such, each slide will be a huge jumble of text to play the roll of teleprompter instead of a visual aid for the audience. To keep you from ignoring the slides, however, they will frequently be interjected with out of place text animation and cutesy clip art.

For the few of you capable of actually paying attention to another human being in lieu of a slideshow, I will frequently break the flow of speech with an amplitude of um’s, err’s, like’s, y’know’s, whatever’s, and so on. I will also be giving equal emphasis to every word. That is to say: none at all. Body movement will be limited, save for the occasional click of the projector remote to advance slides.

By the conclusion, I will have lost the most important members of the audience who realized they had more important things to do, like airdust the gunk from their keyboards. I will finish up by going over a slide that’s almost identical to the introductory slide. I will ask if there are any questions, but it will be apparently obvious the only question on everyone’s mind will be, “can I go now?”

Lets get started, shall we?

With the first season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic complete, I suddenly find myself facing the harsh reality of summer with nary a saucer-eyed equine to soften the blow. Rather than take to my temporary return to mental maturity quickly, I decided to act like a kid a little longer and visit the National Zoo on Mother’s Day. It was crowded and warm, but after walking around the paddocks for several hours, I can safely say that, if nothing else, the National Zoo has magnificent sweet potato fries.

Okay, fine, I suppose it was fun to see lots of rare animals and read little tidbits about them. There is nothing, however, that can disguise the simple fact that most animals are just incredibly boring. Truly, some of the most fun I had that day was watching the squirrels and sparrows bouncing around amongst the crowd.

Oh well. Here have some photos. (Note: Not shown are several photos I took with my 3DS within the reptile and small mammal houses, which, I might add, look awesome!)

Fun Fact: “Maintenance” is zoo code for “escaped animal”. Don’t tell anyone!

D’awwwwww~ Red panda!

To hell with giant pandas! I want to go back to the red panda paddock.

D’awwwwwww!

I would post more, but there’s so much other stuff to do.

Like watch more ponies.

The Best April Fools Jokes
(In order!)

• Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi
• Hulu
• osu!
• Katawa Shoujo blog
• xkcd
• Equestria Daily
• Google
• Halolz
• YouTube
• GameFAQs
• VG Cats
• Playfire
• Xfire

The Places I Wish Had April Fools Jokes

Weather Channel
Facebook
Xanga
Amazon
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Pharyngula

Apple Jack x Twilight Sparkle 4 EVER!!!1!

I think car companies need to start advertising to TV and movie companies. The American consumer is getting pickier and pickier with their automobiles, so it might be time to try and expand the market. These entertainment industries are just the place to go. They’re constantly in the market for new cars. Just look at how many the Mythbusters go through alone!

These companies should start designing cars specifically meant to crinkle like tissue paper and burn like magnesium. They will have all of the super special effects that movie companies spend thousands on built right in! This could be an all-new, all-American industry. Picture it: the Dodge Rammer or the Chevy Frailblazer.

Why should these movie studios, that buy cars by the gross, be forced to modify them themselves. Don’t let the TV studios buy used. Get them to buy the new ones they need!

Coming soon to retailers near you!

It’s the newest CD to ease away your stress and sooth your soul with calming sounds:
Songs of the Server Room

With hits like:

• Server Reboot
• Cooling Fan
• Constant Hum
• And many more!

Comes with a free DVD featuring rows upon rows of blinking green lights to bring complete peace of mind.

Order today!

Finally, the ADD Generation has a movie they can call their own. Rango, a movie by Nickelodeon of all groups, is a rapid fire type of movie that doesn’t have time for such frivolities as subtlety and coherency. We’re busy people. We don’t have time to actually sit back and think.

The movie stars Captain Jack Sparrow as a stir crazy pet chameleon. Wait, that’s stupid. Hurry up and drop him off in the desert. Now that we have Willie Wonka in the desert, what now? Bam! Now he’s the sheriff of a wild western town. Yeah! Everybody loves cowboys. Cowboys? Pfft, that was so five seconds ago. Lets have an Apocalypse Now themed shootout. Wait, these young’uns don’t know about Apocalypse Now. Quick, cut to a Star Wars trench run-like mid-air battle. Whoa, even better: dress up Sweeney Todd as a woman! Yeah, it’s on now! Don’t stop and think! Bam! Rattlesnake with a Gatling gun for a tail! Aww man, can’t top that. Y’know what? Fuck you: it’s time for Clint Eastwood. Bah! Clint Eastwood is old hat. Lets just wrap this up with Edward Scissorhands getting some hot lizard tail. EXPLOSIONS!

Lack of exaggeration aside, I can’t really bring myself to rate the movie highly because it is my least favourite type of movie: the living-a-lie movie. From the moment John Dillinger finds himself in the peaceful town of Dirt, he just keeps digging himself deeper and deeper into his own fiction. The reason I hate this type of movie is because it is always exactly the same, and watching the lies stack up just makes me groan on the inside… and on the outside if I’m watching the movie alone.

One thing I did find interesting was just how grown-up some of the humour was. This came to a head about midway through the movie with a subtle colonoscopy joke. I was grinning and the guy behind me gave a chuckle, but it flew right over the head of the overgrown embryoblasts in the audience. It was weird.

Much as I hated the plot structure, I still wound up enjoying the movie for the most part. It wasn’t mind blowing, but average enough to keep my attention for the requisite amount of time. At least, I think so. I’ll let you know as soon as I stop seizing from the frequent and sudden cuts from dark, starry desert night to blinding, midday desert sun. The movie gets a passable 7.300234 / 10.23.

Side note – Only three people stuck around for the credits, myself and two others, and it was for the exact same reason: to find out who voiced the rattlesnake character. It was Bill Nighy, by the way, also known as Victor from Underworld (I knew I recognized that voice!).

DESK REPORT
2011 March 7
Prepared by: Jimbo (Computing Branch)

---

Owner: Bill Anderson (Computing Branch Manager)
Location: Corner Office (2F15)

Statistics:

• Mahogany
• Four Legs
• Two Drawers
• 3′ x 9′ x 3′
• Inedible

Status:

• Dent on upper-right corner
• Permanent coffee ring near right edge

History:

• 2010 Nov 12 – Ownership passed to Mr. Anderson
• 2010 Jan 24 – Ownership passed to Curtis Sanders
• 2009 May 11 – Moved from cubicle SR23 to office 2F15
• 2009 Mar 15 – Initial purchase by Howard Humbert

Initial Cost: $226.45
Current Worth (estimate): $75.84

Suggested Action:
Stop asking Jimbo to have reports on your desk by an arbitrary point in time.

Jimbo News Network reporting live from President Jimbo’s manga vault as he calls for reform in the Sustain the Industry movement.
Keep Anime Alive

In order to compensate for my unpopular two-part series of posts, here are books I encourage everyone to crucify in their yard.

Forrest Gump – Winston Groom
Genre: crap
I always, always, always hear people tell me that the book is always better than the movie. I used to think that too growing up until I read the book version of Forrest Gump. The movie was a loveable romp through history with a single dim-witted individual changing history and lives. The book only had the single dim-witted individual, with none of the loveableness or interesting views on the past. It was almost painful to read page after page of the rubbish.

Her Fearful Symmetry – Audrey Niffenegger
Genre: crap
Frequent readers may be surprised by this entry since the author shares a spot on my Books That Everybody Should Read list. It looks like she was a one hit wonder, however, since this book is boring, unreadable tripe. I think I only reached the half-way point before banishing it to the back of my bookshelf. Like The Time-Traveler’s Wife, it had one interesting niche that the story could hinge on, the recently deceased old lady who comes back as a ghost, but instead spends almost all of its time on the other characters of an ancient boarding house. This motley group consists of some of the most boring, angsty individuals I have ever encountered. The author should’ve followed the pattern of her last book and focused on the one or two characters that are actually interesting.

Lilith – Siegmund Hurwitz
Genre: crap
I admit that the mythology of Lilith, the world’s first feminist, really interests me. The only problem is that it’s hard to find actual citations for the story. I tried this book since it seemed the closest to a scholarly book I could find. Unfortunately, it reads like it was written by a first-year college student (apologies to first-year college students). It jumps wildly from topic to topic and rarely finishes a single thread of thought. Half of the time, I had to stop and remind myself what the actual topic of the book was, because I think the author forgot too.

The Lost Gate – Orson Scott Card
Genre: crap
Curse you Barnes & Noble and your discount book shelves. If it wasn’t for tempting percentage-off stickers, I could’ve escaped without reading this tosh. Sadly, the lure was too great and I was forced to wade through what must be one of the worst “fantasy” books of all time. I’m not a big fan of the fantasy genre. The only reason I picked up this book (aside from the sale sticker), was because it had an interesting premise: a boy realizes one day he can create portals to go from one place to another whenever he wants. Sadly, instead of dwelling on this, the book revolves a series of mostly disconnected events that have nothing to do with anything. The only real plot takes place during the first few pages and the last few pages. Everything in between is nothing more than the author cashing in the royalty cheques.