The music video for Coparck's "A Good Year for the Robots" is great fun. Via Tor, which rightly says the video is "part Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and part the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz," but misses the third inspiration: Ricky Gervais's The Office.

The headline reads, "Everything You Need To Know About Hitler's 'Missing' Testicle." See also: this Ricky-Gervais-approved German Office parody.

TV news: HBO has ordered a pilot from The Wire's David Simon on post-Katrina New Orleans—sounds perfect—while NBC has posted the first of this summer's Office webisodes.

This Battlestar Galactica/Office mashup pushes all my buttons on this insomniatastic Friday night. Via MeFi, which also has shocking video of Rainn Wilson as MacGyver, Paulie Walnuts, Captain Picard, and Xena the Warrior Princess.

Here's five minutes of my life I won't get back. (That's what she said.)

Leading off this lovely Tuesday linkdump is Barack Obama's college poetry. (Thanks, Tim!) Also in what I loosely refer to as the news:

* Strange Maps tracks the path of a shipment of plastic yellow duckies that fell off their transport in 1992 and still turn up in surprising places. Paging Ze Frank...

* Marginal Revolutions has fun naming ethics papers.

* Bitter Laughter has the sad story of the Rainbow Man.

* And hulu has the original Japanese inspiration for The Office, a surreal and characteristically too-long SNL skit to which there is little to add but Ricky Gervais's own valedictory remarks: "It's funny because it's racist."

An Onion flashback: 'CBS To Release Own Version Of NBC's The Office.'

"You can't just take a show that good, throw in a new set of actors, and expect the same results," said Jennie Tan, who runs a popular fansite for the NBC show. "CBS just has to accept that there will simply never be another character like Michael Scott, ever."

Now that the strike is over, we will be spared the agonizing struggle of having to think for ourselves. TV Guide has the skinny on when your favorite TV shows will return, via MeFi.

I did see with some excitement at io9 that Jericho comes back this week, so my own hypocrisy on this point should not go unnoted. And I did skip down to "O" on that long TV Guide list to see when The Office will be back, too. I'm not made of stone.

For what it's worth, Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Diary notes that the Writers Guild has declared a "huge victory," but others are less sanguine.

America isn't about taking seven pitch-perfect hours of British comedy, dumbing it down, and stretching it out over forty hours and counting. No. America is about doing all that and then spinning off a half-baked sequel.