Blogging this primarily so I don’t forget it: the 50 Best Commercial Parodies. Gems from SNL, In Living Color, MadTV, Chapelle’s Show, etc.
Not sure I agree with the rankings; they appear to skew toward 1970’s era SNL, although I was LOL pleased to re-discover #3, “Robot Insurance.”
Improv Everywhere pulls public stunts that usually have a tinge of the bizarre. They’re probably best known for their annual — yes, annual — No Pants Day where, at a pre-determined time on a pre-determined date, thousands of people worldwide drop their trousers in major subway systems and ride the trains in full pants-free glory. Frequently, their pranks poke fun at corporate targets, e.g. getting 80 people to dress up like Best Buy employees and loiter around a specific Best Buy answering questions and being friendly or having 100+ shirtless men pose in an Abercrombie & Fitch store that had a shirtless male model as a greeter.
But the Best Game Ever prank is by far the best prank ever. Not only does it create a public spectacle, but it brings joy to a bunch of kids by turning a random, everyday little league game into a major league event covered by NBC Sports, complete with Jumbotron, Goodyear blimp, and chest-painted fans.
[via Kottke]
With disappointing repetitiveness, I stumble across some bozo up in arms over some company that’s attempting to “steal your copyright.” These are usually in a lather because they’ve actually read the Terms of Service for [insert web-based application here] and noticed language that looks something like this:
“the submitting user grants [company] the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license.”
A good example is this comment on the Slashdot story last week about Adobe launching an online version of Photoshop Express. I’ve had to deal with these kind of complaints for the web properties I’m responsible for, but my annoyance is nothing new. The first time I remember coming across complaints about these kind of terms is almost a decade ago when Yahoo! took over Geocities. It annoyed me even back then when I was just a humble ed tech trainer, not a product manager responsible for honest-to-goodness web applications.
Although I am not a lawyer and you definitely shouldn’t take legal advice from me, let me explain to you what the heck is going on here: it’s called the Internet.
This New York Times article, “A Journey to Baseball’s Alternate Universe,” is the kind of thing that almost makes me wish I enjoyed math. Almost.
In a fit of scientific skepticism, we decided to calculate how unlikely Joltin’ Joe’s [56-game hitting streak] really was. Using a comprehensive collection of baseball statistics from 1871 to 2005, we simulated the entire history of baseball 10,000 times in a computer. In essence, we programmed the computer to construct an enormous set of parallel baseball universes, all with the same players but subject to the vagaries of chance in each one.
Although it doesn’t quite set free my inner mathematician, it does bring out the writer in me, that little inner voice that says “What if . . .?”
What if one of those 10,000 alternate Joe DiMaggios — one who was less successful in baseball and didn’t marry Marilyn Monroe — slipped through the dimensional interface into the universe where Joe DiMaggio is the baseball legend that he is in ours? Or vice versa?
Crap. Now I’m gonna have to go read a DiMaggio biography.
Does the shape, coloring, and body design of RIM’s new Blackberry 9000 look vaguely similar to any to you guys, too?
Clearly I haven’t been grocery shopping in a while, because this morning I had to whip together a breakfast from whatever was handy. I wound up making tofu seasoned with red curry powder and scrambled with onions, red peppers, jalapenos and fried kielbasa.
I know. It sounds terrible. But it actually turned out to be a big plate of spicy deliciousness.
As I sat down to eat, I wondered if I could have found a way to represent at least one more culture’s cuisine in the same plate. I almost went back for the bottle of sriracha hot sauce to throw a little Thai into the mix . . . but in the end thought better of it. :-)
Yeah, so I spent a couple hours wrangling around with Movable Type last night. I don’t know why. I’d had a lousy day of wrangling with other various bits of software, projects, and people at the office, plus I skipped lunch, so i don’t know what made me think that coming home and before eating dinner deciding to entirely redesign a site I hadn’t touched in two years.
Glutton. For. Punishment.
It could have gone horrifically wrong. I could have gotten in way over my head, what with the HTML and the CSS and the templates and the MT settings and the repeated clicking of the rebuild button. I could have totally lost it and left the job halfway done, and you could be reading this in 12-point Times Roman on a gray background just like 1996. And it did look dicey there for about 30 minutes when I couldn’t figure out why every time I rebuilt the site Movable Type insisted on not rebuilding all the archives. (Answer: set some more radio button preferences and a drop-down or two plus checking the Movable Type documentation. I hate it when I have to RTFM.)
In the end, though, I pulled it off and ordered pad thai to celebrate. The site looks . . . well, it looks like about 2003 instead of 1996. Literally. Those of you who somehow still have me in your feed reader since the days back when I was posting regularly may recognize the same green color scheme and the banner image from a previous design. Stick with what I know how to do.
A couple of years ago, I attempted a much more ambitious site re-design that did go horrifically wrong, and I wound up just slapping up some goofy black-and-orange Movable Type template that I pulled off a free template site. And there it stayed for years, sorta like the stack of boxes sitting next to my desk that I put there when I moved into my condo several years ago. (There’s probably something really important and life-changing in those boxes, but it’s been so long I no longer have any clue what’s in there. It’s like a personal time capsule. One day I’ll get around to opening them up, and then it’ll be all like “Ohhhh, that’s where i left that coffee can full of diamonds!”)
There’s still some hinky stuff. One bit of hinkiness being that if you’ve subbed to my RSS feed, you probably got a full feed of old posts from me when you woke up this morning. Sorry ’bout that. And I’m not gonna be winning any design awards. I expect I’ll want to screw around with colors and line spacing and font sizes . . . or maybe just not touch it for another two years. And, oh yeah, I haven’t even looked at it in Internet Explorer yet, so it may look like ass in IE. But, really, if you’re using IE, just frickin’ switch to Firefox or Safari already. I’m so over you IE users and your quirks.
Anyway. There you have it: Ten Reasons Why slightly updated for the tail end of the decade, but still kicking it with the old school charm. :-)
Now all I have to do is write.
I’m not a huge Lost fan, especially since it employs such a painfully slow and opaque storytelling technique. But I’m enough of a fan (and, apparently, enough of a geek) that I’ve got a theory on why the castaways are on the Island. This theory came together watching the final episode of last season, titled “Through the Looking Glass,” which was re-broadcast last week. I about it right before the season premiere so as to cement a public record of my interpretive and prognostication abilities.
So here’s the clues I picked up on.
Read more…
The Washington Post got the message (if not from me, then from other sources with a wider audience), and published a correction to Marc Fisher’s inaccurate story on Atlantic v. Howell. The correction reads:
A Dec. 30 Style & Arts column incorrectly said that the
recording industry “maintains that it is illegal for someone who has
legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.” In a
copyright-infringement lawsuit, the industry’s lawyer argued that the
actions of an Arizona man, the defendant, were illegal because the songs were located in a
“shared folder” on his computer for distribution on a peer-to-peer
network.
At least they corrected it. But it reminds me that the standard print newspaper practice of burying corrections someplace deep in the paper (and, in the case, website) is as atrocious as it has always been. Corrections, especially for regular columns, should run in the same space that the original ran and run above the lede, not at the bottom of the column.