He actually is, quite hilariously too.

But not all galleries on the site concern Superman’s superdickery. In fact, the funniest of all may be the collection of superheroic unintendended sexual innuendo found in the Seduction of the Innocent gallery:

CAUTION: Consuming beverages while browsing the above website may result in explosive nostril-spraying that could damage sensitive electronic equipment and one’s sense of personal dignity.

George W Bush — incompetent bumbling sociopath, compulsive liar, villainous war criminal, and far and away the worst president in US history; but above all else, the most naturally gifted straight man who has ever lived, and God’s gift to modern comedy.

Oh, by the way, I guess I should mention that this video is not some boring old news thingy — it’s a severely funny spoof by Barry Lank, who plays the reporter at a Bush news conference.

We’ve all seen and heard countless examples of people cutting Bush audio and video clips up and mixing them into new contexts. Surprisingly, these efforts rarely fail to be reasonably humourous — more proof of Bush’s idiot-savant comic powers, which only increase with time and according to how much he’s trying to project an aura of solemn gravity and depth of feeling at any given moment.

This video is a particularly fine example of the genre. Don’t even think about watching it for the first time while cleaning a gun, defusing a bomb, or trying to figure out how to shave with your cool new ultra-retro straight razor.

Here are some SCTV clips, courtesy YouTube.

Especially in the later period of the show’s history, SCTV’s parody was often so richly layered and skillfully sustained it bordered on surreal, like an alternate reality that unknowingly but perfectly constitutes a mocking reflection of our world. But from the earliest shows, it perfectly nailed its target: TV itself, in all its insufferable inanity.

And this was in the days before the ubiquitous presence of high-grade hydroponic cannabis strains (the silver lining of prohibition), requiring late night TV comedy to be extra hilarious. SCTV rose to the occasion with unparalleled consistency.

In fact, when it comes to television sketch comedy, only Monty Python’s Flying Circus can rival SCTV. Saturday Night Live never really came close, even in their classic early years, and despite the many Canadians on both sides of the camera at SNL during its prime.

SCTV was produced in Toronto & Edmonton, as Canadian as maple syrup, inscrutably arcane liquor laws, and child-molesting cultural genocide. The only other remote contenders in the realm of sketch comedy TV since SCTV have also been Canadian, namely Kids in the Hall (2nd thru 4th season) and Codco, the latter actually outdoing SCTV in taking comedy to truly surreal and bizarre places, and though not quite so funnily, still pretty damn amusing.

SCTV was the leading light of an epoch of televisual sketch comedy brilliance that stands as the one unquestionable triumph of late 20th-century Anglo Canadian culture, almost making up for the decades of unwatchable feature films produced by every province other than Quebec.

The videos below barely scratch the surface and are not meant to be a best-of collection, but are a more or less random sampling drawn from the bounty of SCTV gold that digital samaritans have provided for the betterment of humanity on YouTube and other video websites, a rich abundance that we can savor as never before, and perhaps as never again should the hungry ghosts of corporate greed succeed in killing net neutrality and accomplish such other steps necessary to prevent the unthinkable horror of people enjoying something for free that they could instead be made to pay for.

So fill those gargantuan hard drives and write to DVD these treasures while ye may, and flood the government with letters and petitions to maintain the open and free flow of information and our cultural heritage online.

But first, behold comic genius and be merry.

Babe Ruth

The depth of talent in the show was staggering. John Candy alone could have sustained a thoroughly worthwhile weekly comedy half-hour. Then add (in no particular order) Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty, Catherine O’Hara, and Harold Ramis, and you’ve got an assemblage of comic acting and writing power that again can only be rivalled by Monty Python, and perhaps the Firesign Theatre audio comedy quartet.

Thursday Night Live

Almost painfully accurate skewering of Saturday Night Live. Like shooting fish in a barrel – except I’ve heard that’s actually pretty difficult.

Battle of the PBS Stars

Perry Comatose

Benny Hill Street Blues

For those fortunate enough to have never seen The Benny Hill Show, let me assure you — it really was that retarded, and this parody is if anything too kind. The other reference is to the then-popular police TV series Hill Street Blues.

Dusty Townes Sexy Holiday Special

Like I said, surreal. And if you don’t know who Divine was, get thee to Wikipedia.

A True Canadian Christmas

Note the stubby beer bottles, for decades the universal vessel of Canadian brewcraft at its peak of perfection, when every brand not only came in identical bottles, but also tasted exactly the same, namely almost but not quite as bad as American beer, and with more alcohol. But then this state of Edenic purity was sullied by such newfangled flim-flammery as beer in cans, in long-necked bottles, beer from other provinces, and then even from other countries, and the final insult — beer in different styles, colours, and most shocking, flavours. Today’s sophisticated tippler of micro- and imported brew may sneer, but consider the one saving grace of those days of Wonderbread blandness in a bottle — even after adjusting for inflation, it was unimaginably cheap.

The Gerry Todd Show

This pre-MTV parody of primeval music videos and the concept of the “VJ” conveys a sober historical truth: music videos never had a golden age — they’ve always been crap, with rare exceptions. And then as now, the rare exceptions are almost never shown, while crud is played endlessly. See comments on net neutrality and corporate media control above, and consider — if they have their way, the whole internet will suck as badly as commercial TV and radio has for decades.

Night School Hi-Q

Catherine O’Hara as buzzer-happy Margaret is incredible in this venerated classic sketch, displaying here as elsewhere so natural and profound a comedic intelligence that, as with the seemingly effortless perfection of Fred Astaire’s dancing or Louis Armstrong’s singing, it can escape casual notice. By the way, the mysterious fellow playing Gijs, I have just learned is one John McAndrew, a writer for the show who appeared in some skits occasionally. This knowledge was provided by mawsterx, the YouTube member who kindly posted this particular video clip. All hail mawsterx!

Stairways to Heaven

Dead-on musical parody and spoof of K-Tel ads, and so deeply referential and historically specific that anyone not at least out of Kindergarten by 1979 may find it similar to appreciating the subtler points of humour in a Shakespearian comedy, with many long hours of arduous study required to finally reap the harvest of wry chuckles held within.

Tokyo Police Club “Citizens of Tomorrow”. This link seems to be working now. Listen to the lyrics.

The Ballet “In My Head”. I have also uploaded the lyrics and chords for this ever-so-nifty bittersweet lament, in two different keys so you can choose which one you prefer singing to, and in two different file formats: Word, which is preferred if you’ve got MS Word on your computer, and plain text in case you don’t. Actually even if you don’t have Word, AppleWorks might be able to successfully convert the Word document and retain the formatting. Oh yes, the Word document uses a monospaced font called Lucida Sans Typewriter, which I think is installed on most Mac OS X systems, either as part of the OS itself, or with Adobe Reader, or maybe even Microsoft Office or Word. If you have Word and that font, you’re all set. If you have Word and not that font, I can send the font to you. If you don’t have Word, I can send that to you! Except by mail, not online –it’s a bit too big for that, and it’s easier anyway if you have the install CD.

Where are these “In My Head” documents, you ask? At the bottom of this page is a strange box I’ve named “Treasure Chest”. It’s a WordPress widget that connects to a site called box.net where you can store and share up to 10 GB of files for free, with a maximum size for each individual file of 10 MB — which is big enough for the vast majority of music mp3’s that are under ten minutes long, but a rather constricting size for video longer than a couple minutes. Anyway, it’s a darned useful tool even with those limits, as you’ll see, or rather hear, in the Treasure Chest at the bottom of the page.

If everything is working right, you should be able to click any song file in “Treasure Chest” and it will start playing online within a few moments, allowing you to preview the track. Of course, you will want to download all the tracks I’ve put into “Treasure Chest” because they all totally FUCKING RULE!!! To download, hover your mouse over the desired file in the “Treasure Chest” and a menu button will appear for that file — click that, and a little menu pops down which includes a choice to “Download”. Once you get the files onto your hard drive, you know how to get them into iTunes I assume.

These are just some tunes I thought you guys would dig, chosen fairly haphazardly. It’s not like a carefully selected, best-songs-ever collection or anything like that. Though looking over the list I can’t help but notice that every one of them happens to TOTALLY FUCKING RULE!!! And they’re all among my personal faves of the past few months.

For your further enjoyment, a couple more links I mentioned on the phone, conveniently at your mouse-tips:

Many public domain texts read aloud can be found Librivox. For sheer weirdness, check out Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm.

Despite the risk of clicking through page after page until your eyes are shrivelled red-streaked raisins, you should check out the swords-&-sorcery romantic fantasy soap opera web comic Inverloch, which finally reached its conclusion in August 2007, after 3 years or so and hundreds of full colour pages. It’s not mind-blowingly brilliant, but it’s a solid story and the characters are truly charming and rendered with depth and sparkle.

Hello my dearest daughter,

Here’s a collection of very useful sites on the Sega Dreamcast, annotated for your browsing convenience. You may wish to bookmark this page and/or save it to a readily available text or html file as you surf the web for Dreamcast lore, because these are totally killer, Grade-A websites.

Planet Dreamcast looks like one of the better Dreamcast sites. Check out this article listing what the editors feel are among the best Dreamcast games in each of about eight categories, with 3 or 4 titles in each — seems like a good way to get familiar with some of the more notable titles in the Dreamcast universe.

IGN Dreamcast is a big ambitious site that has recently begun a systematic revisiting of all 250 Dreamcast games released in the US, replaying and updating the review for every one. They’ve still got a way to go, but meantime they still have their existing original reviews for a very large number of games, including the one I find quite intriguing: Jet Grind Radio.

Here’s the list of Dreamcast games on the Metacritic site I mentioned to you, sorted from highest to lowest score — not all games are on the list, because Metacritic scores are averaged from multiple reviews online and in magazines, and they don’t display this value until there at least five reviews to calculate an average score from. Notice that Jet Grind Radio is #4 on the list, and much more interesting than the #1 through #3, I think you’ll agree.

Lotsa nifty goodies on the Google Directory page for Sega Dreamcast.

Plenty of Dreamcast games and accessories on eBay, even when limited to sellers located in Canada, which is a good idea for purchases up to $100 or so, given that shipping fees from US sellers are usually at least $20 or higher.

A major Canadian seller of Dreamcast stuff on eBay is PNP Games in Winnipeg, MB. Their prices are quite good, like $10 for a Dreamcast Controller, and they seem to have a wide selection, but shipping stil needs to be factored into the total cost — $10 for the first item, $3 for each additional item.

Dreamcast-Scene and DC Evolution are two hardcore hacker/hobbyist sites, pushing Dreamcast to the limits as a computing platform and general digital Swiss army knife, with lots of links and info on emulators, KallistOS, free public software and game development, hardware mods, and all the rest of the fun geeky stuff.

Dreamcast-Scene offers a “Guide for Dreamcast starters” to help quickly get into all that fun geeky stuff and become part of the extended Dreamcast community. The site also orchestrates petitions and campaigns to forestall discontinuation of some hardware or software component important to the Sega Dreamcast’s continued vitality.

There’s some interesting info in the Wikipedia article on Sega Dreamcast.

And finally, check out these screenshots from “Alice Dreams”, a cool contemporary freeware game developed by a French couple. It’s got a unique painterly visual quality, so exquisitely French in its whimsical charm and casual elegance.

Once we figure out how to burn Dreamcast-readable CD-R’s, we can download that game and a pile of other games and software, burn it all to CDs, and the Dreamcast will rock. I am researching the matter.

Enough Dreamcastery for now, my dear. I’ve been exploring DreamCast sites for hours now — and greatly enjoying it! Now you can benefit from my efforts and go exploring yourself. These sites all have links of their own to yet more of Dreamcast sites, and so constitute something like a network of portals to most if not all of the Dreamcast web presence.

If and when you get an email address that you actually use, let me know and I can send it to you that way as well.

Love from Lord Cattus Reynardicus and his humble monkey slave.