This Looks Like Fun

Awesome 33 Story Swing - video powered by Metacafe

Also of note, the video is a candidate for Metacafe's Producer Rewards which, from its description, sounds to me like the best model so far for monetizing viral videos.

Metacafe will pay you $5 for every thousand views your video gets on our site. Payment starts after your video reaches 20,000 views and has a rating of 3.00 or higher - which tells us that the viewers like the video. On top of that, the license to Metacafe is a non-exclusive deal - you retain ownership of your video. Metacafe helps build your brand by marketing your content and making you money.

Getting Free WiFi at Home

Basically, it's as simple as wrapping an ethernet cable around your cel phone and putting the cel phone in a salad bowl wrapped with aluminum foil (sorry to ruin the suspense).

The Amen Break

An 18-minute audio history of "The Amen Break," a 6-second drum sample from 1969 that has been stolen used in so much hiphop, jungle, and drum n' bass (and subsequently every freaking advertisement on earth) that it has become "part of the lexicon of the collective musical unconscious."

Terry Tate, et al

Top 15 Superbowl Ads of All Time

Moving Sculpture

1958 Porsche Speedster

I'm in Newport Beach, sitting at a desk in a friend's office, looking at that beautiful car at this very moment, from that very angle, as my human pinball game of four cities in two days continues. Thumbs up on the car. Thumbs down on the road warrior lifestyle....

Four. Years. Old.

Terrific Drummer
Uploaded by haos

The Toddlerpede

The works of Jon Beinart and others are available for hours of disturbing viewing at The Surrealist Art Collective

The Importance of Being Not Famous

If knowledge is power, do people you don't know -- or do know -- have more power over you the more they know about you? I think yes.

You will wish to remain anonymous
By KATHLEEN PARKER
Washington Post Writers Group
Prediction: The new hot thing in our future will be anonymity.

To be un-famous.

To be Googled — and to not be there. No link. No Wiki. No tube, space or face. No nothing.

It’s too late for most adults — anyone with a job, a driver’s license or a signature on a public document. But in a world where anyone can be known, what could be cooler than not being known? In a celebrity-saturated culture, what could be hotter than not being a celebrity?

You may have noticed that celebrity ain’t what it used to be. Where there was once hard work and accomplishment behind one’s being awarded celebrity status, today one need only wake up, plug in the video cam and hit a button.

Voila! Insta-fame.

Time was, one had to do something to earn fame. Write a best seller; break a world record; find a cure. Now, one can be famous for being famous. Think Paris Hilton, the most Googled person of 2006.

Thanks to people like Hilton, being anonymous is not, alas, high on most people’s agendas, especially among the twentysomething crowd, the so-called millennial generation.

Recently, the Pew Research Center polled 18- to 25-year-olds about their generation’s top life goals. Of 579 interviewed by telephone, 81 percent said getting rich is their generation’s most or second-most important goal, while 51 percent said being famous was most important.

In USA Today, young people elaborated on those findings, saying they were influenced by the celebrity lifestyles they witness through the media.

While some said they weren’t seeking fame so much as distinction, others see celebrity as an end in itself. Said David Morrison of the research firm Twentysomething Inc.: “We’re seeing the common person become famous for being themselves.”

Thanks to Web phenomena such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, anyone can be her very own self.

On YouTube, millions post everything from Saddam Hussein’s execution to two guys being funny in a dorm room. In some cases, really funny.

Millions of others keep up with friends and make new ones on Facebook and MySpace, where they post their biographies — and photographs many will live to regret.

Both sites require membership to enter and permission from owners to access personal areas. That seems civilized enough, even though recent lawsuits against MySpace’s parent company, News Corp., on negligence and other charges related to adults’ stalking underage users, suggest that privacy is never absolute.

Other new Internet developments are less respectful of ownership. With the advent of cell phone cameras and video, anyone can be made involuntarily famous. The option of being unknown is practically nil, while privacy may be unattainable.

In our brave new world, Big Brother isn’t just watching; he’s snooping.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on new snoop sites where people can anonymously post reports about other people’s foibles — everything from littering to bad parking to, well, you know what you do. And now everyone else can know, too.

Can’t parallel park? You may find your pathetic driving skills posted at Caughtya.org. Drop your candy wrapper on the ground? You may show up at LitterButt.com. Other sites offer postings of people who don’t clean up after Rover, who drive badly, talk too loudly on their cell phone, or steal others’ newspapers.

Shaming is back, say observers of the trend. And while a little shame might be helpful in curbing boorishness, snooping is another level of rude behavior. In democratizing technology, we’ve also empowered the tiny-minded and the underemployed. Everyone’s a potential paparazzo.

Do we really want to live in a world populated by nosy neighbors with nothing better to do? Or who harbor malice toward another? Will cell stalking become the latest misdemeanor?

Anonymity, meanwhile, belongs only to the snoops and spies, who can blog someone’s overheard telephone conversation or capture a couple’s quarrel and post it for millions to see. No name, no blame. Only shame for the victims of tattletales run amok.

On the plus side, video technology has the potential to effect positive social change. In Los Angeles, Cop Watch solicits pictures of people being abused by the police. In Iraq, citizens are reporting events that otherwise might go unrecorded.

But in the personal realm, the bad may outweigh the good until we find a balance between what we can do and what we should do. In the interim, you should assume that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, someone is watching through a lens darkly.

Here’s lookin’ at you, babe.

Al-Jiz and MadTV present: The Death to America News

Attention Actors: Meet Your New Digital Replacements

Three of my favorite memes in this one hypnotically awesome video: 1) Beauty is actually averageness: all facial features are "just right" mathematically... therefore the person possessing them is the safest conduit for passing down your genes by having children with them, therefore, they are sexually attractive -- millions of years of evolution has made this process hard-wired into our brains. 2) The hyper-real will continue to replace the real because it is "more real than real" and thus better. 3) Making the sexy-time with virtual fantasy creations is going to totally rock, dude.

If anyone out there knows Tom Hanks' email address..... might be a good idea to send this link along to him for a laugh.

Note to self: adjust facial fullness from fleshy to thin.

Report: Taliban Spokesman Caught with Anthrax

No reason to worry. Both Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann have assured us that the War on Terror is fictitious.

Governor Suggests Taliban Spokesman Caught 'With Anthrax'

(RFE/RL)
January 17, 2007 -- An Afghan governor today showed the media photographs of arrested Taliban spokesman Mohammad Hanif, claiming he had been picked up in a house containing packets of anthrax powder.

Gul Aghar Sherzai, governor of Nangarhar Province, where Hanif was arrested late on January 15, did not say how it had been proven the powder was the deadly anthrax bacteria or what quantity had been found.

Intelligence officials and police did not confirm the discovery of anthrax.

(AFP)

Everyone knows that Agence France-Presse is in Bush's pocket, so this is clearly propaganda from Chimpy McHitlerburton. A spokesman for the Taliban would in all likelihood never do such a thing: their last spokesman was deemed such a good citizen that he was accepted to Yale University, after all.

Wait a minute! Yale??? That's where Chimpy went to college! I smell a conspiracy!

< / Olbermann >

Viva Las Vegas

Finally made it, Martian flu be damned. Easy four-hour drive, hitting 110 in the Prius on the long hills going down the Cajon Pass.

Dean Martin's house is comically, hilariously, exactly what I expected. The interview clip of him in one of the youtube vids below looks like it was shot downstairs. Very easy to picture him yakking Jim Bean into the bedroom's porcelain oracle my first time in there. Ghosts, and ghosts of ghosts.

I said,, "This house is really familiar" and they said, "Well, it's Dean Martin's house." They didn't say it was Coppola or Nic Cage's house; it was Dean Martin's house. And David Lynch said, "Yes, and he's gone and we're standing here now and just in a flash there'll be another group standing here and we'll be gone."

That's Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys and Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols decimating some time-worn classics. Sid did it his way for real. That ending of that video pretty much summed up his miserable life. On the whole, the early punkers were cool, but The Rat Pack, that was the high point of Western Civ, pretty much. If you were a white guy. Or Sammy.

Proposition Bets

Choromatsu Dead at 29

Choromatsu, the "meditating monkey" who starred in a Sony spot that eventually won best commercial in the late 1980s, died this past Sunday after living for 29 years.

Tank Pr0n

Not having been one of those kids who pored over war pr0n, I have no idea what kind of WW2 tank this is being pulled, intact, from a Swedish riverbank, other than: a totally awesome one.

What a fun day by the river's edge that must have been.

UPDATE: I still don't know what kind of tank it is, but it definitely is not the Polish Tankette model TK-3, pictured below.



Ah, here's the whole story. With minor work, the tank ran like new.

And bonus, there's video:

Demetri Martin

Watch and discover the best answer to the question, "Are you ticklish?"

These Glutes Are Made for Walkin'

It's not a Keffiyah, It's an "Anti-War Scarf"

Now you can be a cool anti-war protester like the model citizens of Berkeley and Gaza!

Buy the "Anti-War Scarf" by Urban Outfitters (link goes to complaint form).

Manly

Take it from my buddy Ben Reed, you don't want to smell like wild flowers and shame.

Great spot.

What a no-brainer that casting session must have been.

"What about Ben Reed?"

"Sure."

Non-Newtonian Fun

Take water, corn-starch, and blend real hard for a real long time, and you get this.

Unhappy? Try Self-Hypnosis

Not recommended if techno music and iPod billboards make you unhappy.

iPhone Close-Up Demo

Trying to Get to Vegas

More delays. Looks like Sunday now.

This was Elvis in 1968, his first comeback. Top of his form since the first Sun Sessions. Just great great stuff.

Valedictory: Forbidding Mourning

I'm off to Vegas to start another chapter in my life. LA this time around has been grand, and many new friendships have been gained, and many hard lessons learned.

And now, it's time to kick it old style. Should be a kick in the head.

You gotta admit, the pool looks nice.

And ultimately, that's what it's all about, isn't it?

Open Season - the anti-CAIR Remix

Heading Back to LA

It's been a great return trip to Kansas City for the holidays, but after one more big meeting here today, it's time to go home. To that end, here's Slim Gaillard with Bam Brown and Scatman Crothers playing, "Laguna-areeni" at Billy Berg's in Hollywood 1946.

Enjoy.

Monday, there will be another song posted, for another city, as I'm moving to Vegas on that day.

The Ol' Statue of Liberty