Okay, it's a very cheesy song, as the guy who produced it says several times, lest you believe he doesn't know. The history of this video is explained here at Mashable, but the short version is that it was put together as part of a challenge put on by the BBC to create a charting UK single for charity by using the noisy, inventive, intermittently literate community of YouTube users.
I know that for many of you, this is like creating an award-winning dish based on Gummi bears and Fresca, but this is actually ... not horrible, if you think of it as a novelty number created for charity and intended only to be fun. I'll say it this way: it could have been so much worse.
Two years ago when writer/director Dave Seger was walking through the Ikea store in Burbank, California it struck him how much the faux bedrooms, kitchens and dens looked like "pre-lit sets." He thought it would be a great place to shoot and direct. Being a relatively unknown talent, he didn't think it was likely that Ikea officials would give him permission. Earlier this year, when Canon came out with a still camera that also had HD video, Seger realized he could shoot scenes while looking like a tourist with a penchant for big furniture stores.
Ikea Heights is part soap opera, part noir murder mystery and all camp. The first episode opens with a shot of James and Candice Melville (played by Randall Park and Whitney Avalon) waking up (fully clothed of course) in their "bedroom," complete with price tags. As James says goodbye to his wife and heads to work we know by the look on his face and the way she avoids his kiss that that something is rotten in, well... Sweden.
The "sets" of Ikea do work perfectly and the looks on the faces of the shoppers are priceless as they try and hide their curiosity behind a mask of nonchalance. After all, this is Burbank, and the folks here are used to a movie shoot or two. It's fun to watch how Seger takes comic advantage of the fact that this is not an actual set with working props. In one scene, when harried wife Vivianne Jespens (Jess Lane) tries to turn on the faucet, no water comes out. Her husband Thomas (Tom Kauffman) is forced to admit that he lost his job and hasn't been paying the bills.
The Internet is clearly becoming a great place for unknown creative types to cut their teeth, and this is one of the more silly yet inventive short drama series I've seen online. Seger, at 26, is part of a group of aspiring television and film artists called Channel 101 who get together monthly and screen short comic series they've made. Everyone votes on the best shows and the winners get the privilege of making yet another episode. So far, Seger has made four five-minute episodes of Ikea Heights. He plans to make another episode this month.
It's not clear what Ikea is going to do about this. They didn't return my call in time for this post, so I don't know how much they actually know about Seger's furtive plans. But, then again, this is Ikea Heights; you never know what might happen next.
Eight years ago this morning, my friend (and Monkey See contributor) Sarah Bunting was speaking on a panel about online content valuation that took place a few blocks from the World Trade Center.
Every year, I reread the essay she wrote about her experiences, not to relive the very frightening things she saw, but because the story includes moments of grace realized -- the lady who sells her (gives her, really) a pair of shoes to change into, the Chinese restaurant that lets her in to clean up in their restroom, where she notes that she has ashes in her hair -- that provide, as she often says, the very very tiny rays of hope to be taken from it.
But her greatest help that day came from Don, the "disaster buddy" she stayed with on the walk from the Bank Of New York, where they -- along with a lot of other people -- had taken shelter, to the point where he got on a ferry to go home to Jersey City.
Today, among other things, is Don's birthday, and every year, Sarah puts out a call to see if she can find him, just so she can say thank you. This year, her story was featured on WNYC's The Takeaway.
(Stacking the karmic deck in her favor, just a tad: Sarah is a major doer of Internet good deeds: her blog, Tomato Nation, holds annual fundraisers for Donors Choose, an organization that raises money for classroom projects, and each of the last two years, she has raised more than $100,000. She has shaved her head for charity, and she has dressed as a tomato and danced in the middle of Rockefeller Center.)
So if you are looking for something positive to focus on, read a little about Don and see if you might know him. You have to admit, it would be pretty cool to be the person who solved the mystery.
Marvel is the golden egg, and Disney is the cake company, and if you keep reading, it will all make sense, really. (Marvel Comics, iStockphoto.com)
By Glen Weldon
On Monday, the news came down. The analyses began. Jokes were joked. Freakouts were well and truly freaked.
The news: Disney acquired Marvel Comics for $4 billion. ("Acquired," which makes it sound like Marvel's a tube of Pink Glitter lip gloss that somehow ended up in Disney's purse as it sauntered out of Hot Topic. "How'd THAT get there?")
If you need a taste of what folks in the comics industry are saying about it, you can't beat The Beat,
or Journalista! The transcript of the Disney/Marvel call to investors is worth checking out, if only to remind yourself that there are people in the world who actually say things like "vertical integration," "the wheelhouse of this distribution channel" and who - willfully! repeatedly! - use "impact" as a verb.
Conventional wisdom soon congealed along these lines: Good for Disney, because Marvel's stable of heroes can help them reach boys age 8-18, a demographic that has thus far proven stoically resistant to the charms of Hannah Montana and High School Musical -- with, um, some exceptions (Hi, Jason! Stay fabulous, kiddo!). Good for Marvel, because Disney's got more distribution channels in their wheelhouse (sigh) than Cruella's got Dalmatian handmuffs.
After the jump: It's not about the comics. And yes, the Tastykake Analogy.
Mad Men Yourself allows you to create a personalized cartoon you, which can look however you'd like. (Created at MadMenYourself.com)
by Linda Holmes
If you've seen your Facebook or Twitter feed over the last week turn into a patchwork of little cartoon heads, you're probably experiencing the effects of Mad Men Yourself, an AMC-sponsored online application that creates a personal, Mad Men-ized version of you -- or of what you wish you were. (I was honest enough to give myself coffee, anyway, as you can see.)
The site has been very successful; the icons it generates have been popping up all over social media. And it turns out that, to create this terrific online doodad, AMC turned to someone who was already making great Mad Men online doodads: an artist who goes by the name Dyna Moe and has been creating a beautiful set of drawings called Mad Men Illustrated for quite some time.
As she explained in a recent interview, Dyna didn't start out as some ordinary fan of the show; she knew a cast member and so wasn't a total stranger. Still, what she was doing wasn't authorized by anyone. But rather than send her the cease-and-desist she admits she half-expected, the show decided to adopt her and get her to work for them, and now they have one of the most clever and quickly adopted marketing tricks for a TV show that has gone by in quite some time.
It's particularly interesting to see AMC go down this road, because the network got itself into a dust-up about a year ago when it forced Twitter to suspend the accounts that fans had set up in the names of Mad Men characters. The network eventually backtracked, but it was a forehead-slappingly dumb example of alienating your best resource, which is your superfans.
It appears that between last summer and now, somebody has learned something about unauthorized riffs on your show that are done by people who love your show: before you send an attorney's letter ordering them to stop stepping on your toes, consider asking them to dance. They might say yes, and it will be more fun for everybody.
Not much in the way of comics news this week; the industry's gone silent as everyone who's anyone — along with thousands of no-ones dressed as Ewoks — decamps to San Diego for Comic-Con.
So now seems as good a time as any to spend some virtual ink on the webcomic, a relatively new medium that fuses classic comics tropes to the virtual infrastructure of buggy Powerpoint presentations.
After the jump: A webcomics primer, and a sampler of the best and brightest. And weirdest. Let's not forget the weirdest.
Wil Wheaton: Just one of the feeds you can follow without grinding your teeth. David Livingston/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
When NPR ran a piece a couple of weeks ago in which it was suggested that Twitter "tweets" (sorry, that word still gives me hives) should be punctuated and written in sentences, there was some suggestion from commenters that this was a rather bizarre notion, perhaps suggestive of OCD or "unacceptable prescriptivism."
It got me thinking about the fact that Twitter's reputation for abbreviated "thx 2 U" messages doesn't reflect my use of the service at all. Almost no one I follow writes like that. Of course, a lot of the people I follow are writers. Nevertheless, it seemed like a good time to point out that lots (and lots and lots) of Twitter feeds are, for the most part, punctuated, properly spelled (absent the occasional typo), and in sentences. (Obviously, there are exceptions, particularly when people are retweeting from others, playing games, or trying desperately to squeeze into the character limits.)
You can see the list of feeds I officially follow through the blog here (and, of course follow the Monkey See feed here), but here are some of the ones that won't make you feel like you're invading a sixth-grader's list of text messages.
Last night, Wheaton -- once of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Stand By Me, of course -- wrote about his shock upon being followed (on Twitter, on Twitter, people) by William Shatner: "Head: exploding. Mind: blown." This bit of staccato nerdhood aside, he generally only uses expressions like "OMG" when quoting his cat. You'll see.
Schur is one of your major Renaissance men of the 21st century: he's a showrunner for Parks And Recreation and a writer on The Office, he plays Dwight's Cousin Mose, and for a surprisingly long time, he managed to write incognito as "Ken Tremendous" on the much-missed sports blog Fire Joe Morgan.
Relatively new to Twitter, he's noteworthy for obsessing over sports and being an obvious product of many writers' rooms: once he bites on one of the little games that travel around Twitter, like today's "Things Heard During A Fight," he won't just contribute one -- he'll throw out four or five jokes at a time, rat-tat-tat.
Once an MTV personality and now a sort of general entertainment news guy-about-town, Dave Holmes (no relation) writes one of the most eclectic, weird, and enjoyable Twitter feeds I follow. He shares Schur's fondness for Twitter joke-telling games, but he also has a keen eye for short-form culture writing, as when he simply wrote, "I'm Obviously In My Early Thirties, Beth Cooper."
Your Battlestar Galactica source, Ken Burns humor, and more, after the jump...
This Sunday, a fan-made prequel to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy will go live on the web. Two years in the making, The Hunt for Gollum was a labor of profoundly nerdy love for its British creators, who spent a reported $4,500 (£3,000) making the thing — and don't intend to make a single copper piece off of it. (Check Laura Sydell's report on the flick from last night's ATC.)
If the trailer's anything to go by, it'll be, at the very least, pretty to look at. The makeup and costuming seem mightily impressive. (The filmmakers saved on costs by sharing wardrobe with another Tolkien fan film called Born of Hope, which is still in the works).
Fan films, like fan fiction, have been around a long time, and most savvy filmmakers see them for what they are: potent emblems of the devotion their creations have inspired in a passionate few, not to mention a conveniently low-maintenance way to keep those creations alive in the public consciousness.
George Lucas, for example, now encourages fans to come play in his filmic sandbox by sponsoring a yearly fan film award.
But the Tolkien estate — and New Line, the studio behind the Peter Jackson films — have historically been quick on the draw with cease-and-desist letters. And there's a couple of things about this particular fan film that might draw the Eye of Sauron.
Grey's Anatomy: Just one of the ABC shows on its way to Hulu. But does it matter? ABC
by Linda Holmes
Today, we learned that ABC shows, as well as some other Disney-controlled content, will be coming to Hulu.com. Until now, ABC shows have been available primarily through the network's own site, ABC.com.
That means that, with NBC and Fox having been the original partners, of the four major broadcast networks, only CBS is staying out of the Hulu deal. (They stream episodes of some shows -- though not as many as other networks -- at both CBS.com and TV.com.)
So: Is this significant?
The interface, the selection, and strength in numbers, after the jump...
While you were (probably) asleep, Ashton Kutcher and CNN were finishing up their contest to see who could be first to get one million followers on Twitter — thus becoming the first ever to reach that point. Each party had agreed to donate 10,000 mosquito nets to battle malaria if they won, and 1,000 nets if they lost.
Oh, and Kutcher vowed to "ding-dong ditch" Ted Turner's house if he won — meaning ring the doorbell and run away. (Even though Ted Turner doesn't own CNN anymore, it's still pretty funny, mostly because the Punk'd co-creator would absolutely do it.)
In the above video, you can watch as Kutcher — who tweets as "@aplusk" — goes over the top before CNN.
Combine this with the fact that Oprah now has 62,000 people following her account despite not having written anything, and we are well through the looking glass here. Kutcher will reportedly appear on Oprah today, along with the founder of Twitter, to (we hope) discuss the fact that this is all really, really weird.
Now that the Susan Boyle-lash is well underway, it's a good time to look back on how we got here and what's likely to come next.
In the first stage of a phenomenon based on warmth, public affection begins to grow as people discover something like, say, a surprisingly nice performance of "I Dreamed A Dream."
In the second stage, some major party — here, it was Ashton Kutcher on Twitter most of all — publicizes the nascent discovery and creates an enormous and sudden growth of interest.
And that sets up the next phase, where things go differently.
Three more phases and how this all relates to cat calendars, after the jump...
Last night at Carnegie Hall, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra debuted under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, who called the project "somewhere between a classical music summit conference, Scout Jamboree, with an element of speed dating."
For more about the development of the project, you can check out this March piece from All Things Considered.
Note that the group got a decent review from the New York Times, which admitted that it was "gimmicky" (file that under "stating the obvious") but also acknowledged that the group played "quite well," particularly given the short rehearsal time. In fact, Anthony Tommasini seemed mostly frustrated at not hearing a more straightforward concert from these talented folks who were rounded up via online auditions.
The Twitter hashtag: See this bullhorn? The hashtag is a little like this. Just ask Amazon. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
It looks like Twitter will only show you the last 100 pages of tweets covered by a search. Right now, that means you can only see the last three hours of tweets submitted under the hashtag "#amazonfail."
A hashtag is basically a little identifier you attach to a post on Twitter to allow people to search for it. It enables wider conversations, because you can follow the discussion about a particular topic by searching for all the tweets -- everyone's, not just the people you know -- for that tag.
In this case, "#amazonfail" was developed to track tweets about the fact that Amazon.com has apparently removed the sales rankings of many books with gay and lesbian themes on the theory that they are "adult." (This is the explanation Amazon gave to author Mark Probst early on.)
Removal of sales rankings has several effects -- it stops your book from appearing in best-seller lists, but more to the point, it interferes with searching, causing the book in some cases not to show up even when you specifically search for it.
Though it was, in early stories, referred to as an issue about "erotica," this does not only apply to fiction. As of this writing, they've also de-ranked this edition of The Mayor Of Castro Street: The Life And Times Of Harvey Milk (though some other editions are available).
Note that the edition of The Mayor Of Castro Street that's de-ranked seemingly includes "Gay & Lesbian Biographies" as one of its assigned categories, while the one that kept its rank only lists "Literature and Fiction: General."
Another edition oddity, and where we're going from here, after the jump...
When Funny Or Die posted this video yesterday, after spending a day hyping it, expectations were high. It's an impressively large cast -- Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens, Nicole Sullivan, Brody Jenner, Carmen Electra, Queen Latifah, Lance Bass, Nicole Richie...a veritable cavalcade of ninnies, which is apparently supposed to be the joke.
The problem is that...the joke isn't much of a joke. There are a few good line readings from Sullivan, but for the most part, the rest of it is unfunny, wooden people being wooden and unfunny, apparently hoping to get laughs because they are lame and vapid. Brody Jenner saying "Keynesian economist" isn't as funny as it's supposed to be, because Brody Jenner is dumb, but can read scripted lines, so...so what?
There's just no idea here. Rich idiots having a pool party? Even one crashed by a couple of non-rich idiots? Who cares? The thing is five minutes long (and feels much longer) and it doesn't have a center. The Jenner joke seems to be that these people are secretly really smart, which could have been entertaining, but it's not pursued in the other...oh, four minutes and 45 seconds.
It sort of feels like there have been enough things like this -- celebrities doing drop-ins in unexpected places, like Matt Damon did with Sarah Silverman and so forth -- that now, you can't just say, "Hey, these famous people are taking time out to appear in an Internet-only venture!" This is way too on-the-nose, far too clearly begging to be made viral.
The difference between this and James Francoacting out scenes from The Hills is that the Franco bit contains a joke. It's not just, "Lookit! James Franco! Pass it around!"
There's no ironic distance at which Vanessa Hudgens becomes funny. Funny Or Die does some great stuff, but this is a miss.
MTV's The Paper ran for a total of eight episodes last year, and in that time, it demonstrated more about what makes high school so difficult and often painful than any documentary I can remember. It's not an exaggeration to say it wound up being an extraordinary story about being resilient, being a friend, being an individual, being a coward, and wearing purple leggings to school. (It's also hilarious, entertaining, and amazing conversation-bait between friends.)
It's too easy to populate documentaries or reality shows about teenagers with the ones who are vapid, who have nothing in their heads, or who are specifically dedicated to being evil all the time. It's a little harder to talk about how painful things can be even for smart, serious kids -- say, kids who are fully devoted to the operation of an award-winning high-school newspaper.
Happily for all of us, Sling.com now has all the episodes of The Paper available (the first is at the top of the post), and they're conducting a coordinated Rewatch, in which you can follow along with one quick (about 22-minute) episode per weekday and talk about it in the comments.
Honestly, experiencing Amanda Lorber for yourself -- controversial, annoying, heartbreaking, clueless, inspiring, wildly enjoyable Amanda Lorber -- is worth every second you'll spend.
Very bad ideas: "Don't you want to eat this cupcake? Don't you? Don't you? Huh? Huh?" iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
There's a new service that will allow bakeries to send you a tweet every time they pull fresh baked goods out of the oven.
What kind of a twisted, bare-knuckled sadist thought this up? Look at this feed from Albion's Oven.
"Bouncy, beautiful cup cakes, nice and iced, plump, and ready for your delight. Come and get 'em."
"Chunky slabs of sticky CHOCOLATE CAKE, munchably moist, freshly baked."
All day long, this will be sent to you. All day long. Eat some warm, pliable cookies! Wouldn't you rather put that salad down and have a delicious, buttery croissant? Who needs adequate blood flow to your extremities when you can have CHOCOLATE CAKE?
What's next? "A frosty margarita is sitting on the bar with a slice of lime on the rim and droplets of sweat beading on the outside of the glass." "Wouldn't dusty lungs full of tobacco smoke feel great today?" "If you fake an attack of tuberculosis right now, you could be at the ball game before they throw out the first pitch!"
Sheesh. The popularity of Ashton Kutcher's Twitter feed doesn't actually mean people are looking to be tortured.
Philosophically, I have a lot of doubts about guerrilla blogs like this. As the writer points out himself, you can't always tell whether people have a disability themselves just by looking. At the same time... I can sort of understand how he became frustrated, and he's certainly right that a good number of these people are working hard not to see him.
The Facebook redesign: The company promises changes, but is it too little too late? iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
It's always a bad idea to draw too many conclusions about the redesign of a web site until users have lived with it for a couple of weeks. Redesigns are almost always unpopular -- in part because they often aren't well thought out, but in part because people hate change.
But the new layout and functionality (or dysfunctionality) of Facebook (gradually introduced a couple of weeks ago) aren't getting any more popular with age.
[Here's an anecdote: I went to investigate the current landscape in new-design-hating Facebook groups so I could tell you about it, and I...could not find Facebook groups. I had to post a plea for help. I kick around sites of all kinds all day long, and I cannot remember the last time a redesign hid something that significant from me. I eventually found them in a little bar at the bottom that doesn't even look like part of the page. Bottom line: resistance to change aside, it is a very, very bad redesign.]
Facebook has now -- by utter necessity -- gone into damage control mode, vowing to make some of the changes to the new layout that are being most loudly demanded, but apparently taking a sort of "horse is out of the barn" approach to the fact that almost every aspect of the redesign is universally loathed. They're going to fiddle with it, but they're not going to just undo it, as they should.
There is nothing that can be tweaked that will get the company one-tenth of the goodwill they would get from, right this minute, announcing that they're rolling back to the old design. Despite the money they sunk into the changes, despite the long meetings they undoubtedly all suffered through, it's a failure. It's New Coke. And now there are peasants, and pitchforks, and it's only going to get uglier.
In heaven at the buffet: Jim Gaffigan, seen here explaining holiday traditions, offered some interesting updates on Twitter last night.
by Linda Holmes
As yesterday's piece about Twittering celebrities noted, there are plenty of famous people you do not actually want to follow on Twitter. You will not like the result. (Though I admit to finding Shatner charming.)
There are others, however, who are fascinating little studies, and one of them is comedian Jim Gaffigan, who had apparently abandoned his Twitter feed for something like a year and a half and reemerged about a week and a half ago, partly to promote his Comedy Central special, King Baby, which premieres Sunday night at 9:00 p.m..
Since then, his feed has been a combination of the mundane and the baffling, but as he's gotten his feet under him a little, Gaffigan has started to use Twitter for a weird brand of real-time fever-dream comedy. Things start out normally enough -- "I'm tweeting from the plane. Way up in the sky. Now I can waste time even on a plane. Not that sitting on a plane is not wasting time" -- but gradually become stranger and stranger, with no obvious cut-off between reality and fiction, until you get to "I am now FLYING THE PLANE." (All of this happened last night.)
Gaffigan went on to explain that while he was in the cockpit, a man had burst in, angry that he was sending too many tweets, and had shot him. "I'm dead," he tweeted. And then, "Twittering from heaven. NIce up here. Very Echoey. 'Hello' (hello, hello, hello)." And finally, "In heaven at a buffet with Carlin. What is Stalin doing here? Hmm. Should I call him Joe or Joseph?"
The novelty is going to wear off for a lot of performers who are currently using Twitter. The ones who survive will be the ones who find a way to get so much promotional punch out of it that it becomes a fundamental arm of their marketing strategies, and the ones who -- and this is more interesting -- actually use it as a platform to perform.
Other performing Tweeters and why this may or may not be your thing, after the jump...
The blog debate:Variety may be responsible for a debate better than it entirely deserves. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
I see the Variety newsfeed every day, and I was surprised to see threeseparatepieces about how much they hate entertainment-industry bloggers.
It isn't really aimed at commentary blogs, but at "breaking news" blogs, and specifically at Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily, which was the target of most of the vitriol.
Obviously, some of the points about accuracy and speed sometimes pulling against each other are completely valid, and the distaste for blogs spending their time whining about each other instead of talking about...what they're supposed to be talking about is something most blog-followers are familiar with. At the same time, the generalizations are so broad that it's hard to know where to go next. Blogs vary in value just as much as print media does, and they're not all alike, any more than The Economist is the same as People just because they're both issued on paper.
Of many responses that have followed, I was most heartened by this excellent essay at Film School Rejects. FSR is more of a commentary blog and not really in the Variety line of fire, but the calmness and lack of defensiveness in the piece makes it much more substantive than, in fact, the pieces that started the conversation in the first place.
Internet land mines: Do you recognize these guys? They are #7 on the list. Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
Don't do it. You may want to do it, but don't do it. You may think you are among friends, but you only think that because you have not brought up any of these topics yet. Tempers will flare. Nothing good will come of it.
1. Home schooling. This one combines the explosive issue of child-rearing with religion and stay-at-home versus work-outside-the-home parents. Always a delicious stew of vitriol. Wait for the moment when someone brings up that girl who spelled "euonym" to win the National Spelling Bee.
2. Bikes versus cars versus pedestrians. In this discussion, every car is that one that opened its door and almost clobbered you while you were ferrying a basket of native prairie grasses for replanting in an urban greenway, and every bike-rider is that one that swerved in front of you while giving you the finger and wearing a T-shirt that says "Anarchy." Eventually, someone will wish broken bones upon someone else, and it's all downhill from there.
3. Chiropractors. People with bad backs can be extremely cranky. Alternative medicine in general is a dangerous area, but for some reason, clashes between people who consider chiropractors to be miracle workers and people who consider them the equivalent of head-bump readers always sets off the fire alarms.
4. Declawing cats. I am seriously not even going to describe this debate, because I am that afraid of it.
The last six, including an HBO cliffhanger, the clash of the titans, and that one band you hate, after the jump...
Depression Cooking: In this video, great-grandma Clara makes cooked bread -- good for kids or, as she points out, old people with no teeth.
by Linda Holmes
My new Internet hero is Clara Cannucciari, a 93-year-old great-grandma who has her own YouTube cooking show where she cooks meals from the Great Depression. It sounds like it would be...hopelessly corny, or treat her with the patronizing "old people are adorable" attitude that's so hard to avoid.
Her shows are nothing like that, though. She's just a lady who has been cooking since many, many years before most of the people watching her were born, who has a completely different attitude about food from what you typically see on video when people talk about cooking. Her ideas about what's tasty and good for you are, for people who have followed the wild swings of the low-fat/low-carb pendulum, amusingly consistent with current thinking: her attitude about olive oil is, "We use a lot; it's good for you," and almost everything has a vegetable in it. It goes without saying, of course, that the times are also right for food that truly stretches the budget.
Mostly, though, she's just...lovely to watch. Warmly funny but not at all a ham, she tells stories without rambling, isn't hesitant to say when she's checked with her brother for details of something she forgot, and never seems to be talking down to anyone about the ruination of the culture or how much better or stronger everyone was in the Depression. I just love watching her, and I encourage you to run-don't-walk to her YouTube channel.
(Hat-tip to The Simple Dollar, which wrote a lovely piece about Clara.)
I learned something new while researching the new Pussycat Dolls version of "Jai Ho," the Oscar-winning song from Slumdog Millionaire.
It turns out that everybody and their three-year-old is posting YouTube videos of themselves dancing to "Jai Ho." Up there at the top is an unnamed small child getting his groove on, and believe me, there's much more.
So in news that surprises no one, alleged Dating A Banker Anonymous "founder" Laney Crowell now admits that the whole thing was made up. There's no support group, the blog entries are fictional, there are no members (the closest thing there is to a support group is "I go out to brunch with my friends and talk about guys and dating"), there are no actual failing relationships, and they don't even know anyone who's actually a "DABA girl" in the way they described.
So for those of you who followed the initial post and the Times response we got a couple of weeks back, it ends not with a bang, but with an interview in a coffee shop.
The New York Times has now published its "Editor's Note," which essentially says that it used the wrong terminology in describing the group.
If you wondered why Will Smithsaid "Boom goes the dynamite" the other night at the Oscars after he biffed a little bit of his scripted patter, enjoy -- or rather, "enjoy" -- this much-distributed, but still entertaining, viral video in which a hapless college sportscaster has a very painful buildup to what he's obviously certain is his Great Idea. It's pretty painful, but boy, he's ready for that shot to go in, isn't he?
Facebook updates: Is this the reason you never joined the Peace Corps? iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
I like this little piece in The New York Times about Facebook updates. Virginia Heffernan is right about the brightness with which people express detail at times. Some of my friends post very creative status updates, and they are, indeed, little bursts of great writing.
But what was really curious to me was the extraordinary hostility expressed in some of the comments attached to the piece. Like this one:
All this social nattering is a waste of time. Meaningful discussion and the exchange of ideas is sacrificed to virtual graffiti. Visitors from another galaxy will unearth the Facebook/My Space/Twitter phenomenon a thousand years from now, concluding that the human species were suddenly stricken dumb by some terrible degenerative disease.
Or this one:
useless noise. go about your business, then call on your actual friends once in a while, to catch up.
Or this one:
call a friend or go see him/her. join the peace corp. help someone. take a walk, work a soup kitchen, stop this adolecent, narcissistic, self-absorpsion called facebook and myspace and texting, growing like insidious cancer...there, that dramatic enough for your facebook update?
Or here's a good one:
If even half the time spent on "social networking" was actually spent increasing our knowledge, we would have known why ARM's aren't good for us, why producing things made of air aren't profitable, and why the time wasted on any of this are hours of our lives we'll never get back.
The litmus test is not whether you can get a clever update posted, it's whether or not having this is essential to survival. The answer is no.
I will admit that Facebook is not essential to survival. But...why would anyone be so angry about a purely voluntary system in which other people engage in what is primarily small talk?
Yes, I care what you had for dinner: after the jump...
Do you have a movie in you? Is your cinematic vision being held back by things like prohibitively expensive equipment and a frustrating inability to corral (or make) enough friends to properly collaborate? Are you looking for a way to punt anywhere from 15 minutes to an entire day's worth of work?
Fret no more: Xtranormal is here to help. Choose a setting, drop in some characters, type out their deepest secrets (or some fart jokes), pick a few camera angles, add some gestures and sound effects (see above, re: fart jokes) and voila! You're an instant John Lasseter.
The example above comes from the opening of Linda Holmes' "Couch-Potato-ing The Grammys With NPR Music's Stephen Thompson" blog post from last night. I think you'll agree that it really captures the essence of the conversation, without having to do any of that pesky "reading."
It's also important to note that, start to finish, this entire thing took little over half an hour to create. (Yes, even with Linda retching at the merest mention of Katy Perry.) Brilliant as it is, just imagine how amazing it would be with a solid hour's worth of effort. You'd be hearing a lot less about WALL*E, I can guarantee you that.
It is, of course, not perfect. In order to save and share your cinematic masterpieces, you'll have to register (thus bringing the number of times you've registered for something on the Internet to a cool hundred thou). You'll have to wait for your work to render itself into a final product, which can be nearly unendurable when you're a gifted artist with an urgent message that just needs to be shared with the world. And for some reason, the voice software struggles with the correct pronunciation of "shouldn't" while clearing "Saadiq" with minimal difficulty.
But that's a small price to pay for a degree of freedom and control that your Sims characters could only dream of, if they could only dream. (They can't; they're not real.) And heck, for all the limitations of the slightly wooden dialogue, the characters are already more expressive than Milo Ventimiglia. Have at it, and we'll see you at next year's Oscars.
DABA girls Laney Crowell, left, and Megan Petrus with a friend Photo: Eric Strauss
We had a post last Thursday looking into the much-discussed "support group" known as Dating A Banker Anonymous, and on Friday night at about 10:45, I received a statement from The New York Times. The statement says:
"Ravi Somaiya, a freelancer for The Times, first heard about the DABA group in early October, when he met Megan Petrus at a party. The blog started shortly afterward at this address: http://dabagirls.tumblr.com/page/1.
Ravi told his editor about it in December and began reporting in earnest after the New Year.
The fact that they moved their site and gussied it up did not seem worth noting in the article and does not seem particularly surprising or important now.
As for the size of the group/blog audience: We never said, nor implied, it was some kind of mass phenomenon. We made it clear that it was informal, we said that five women were at the cocktail-session we attended. The reason we liked the story — likely the same reason it has attracted so much attention — is that we knew it was resonant with many people who had nothing to do with their group but found themselves in similar situations.
I'm not sure what is thought might be fake about this. Ravi did talk to some of the men to verify the relationships and get their side.
So that's the Times response. As you'll see, the Tumblr.com address they provided doesn't have any content to speak of, except a cartoon posted on Nov. 4.
So I'm not sure whether the Times believes that (a) the blog was all at that address at one time, but (b) for some reason the women went through, after moving the blog to its present WordPress address, and deleted all the entries except the cartoon , or ... (c) what the relevance of the Tumbler address is, really.
Because my question about the site, to clarify, is not whether it was "gussied up" in January. It's when the entries were posted.
And my question about the DABA group is not whether it is a mass phenomenon, but whether there is in fact, as reported in the original Times story, a group of 30 regular participants in the blog and/or at "meetings."
And with all due respect, I do think those questions are relevant, at least relative to how important the story was to begin with.
Unfortunately, the Times' timeline isn't helping me understand either:
• The Times statement says the freelancer found out about the DABA girls in early October, and that the blog started sometime after that.
But ...
• The blog entries date back to late September.
Furthermore, the statement says:
• The reporter learned about "the DABA group" in early October.
That seems to suggest that the reporter learned about the group at a party at least a month before it was "founded." So again, I'm sort of confused by what it is the Times' editors and spokeswoman understand to have happened.
There are a bunch of other questions that this raises, both factual and philosophical, but unfortunately, other matters call.
I still have all the questions now that I had last Thursday, along with some new ones. But it would seem that the Times, having made this response, is satisfied with the state of the record, so I'm not sure how much more can be said without my becoming a full-time forensic investigator of bankers' girlfriends, which I do not want to be. (I did e-mail the ladies; so far no response.)
That said, one final thought: I'm not sure anything about this whole business surprised me as much as the statement that the Times ran the story because they knew the women would be so "resonant" for other people in the same situation — and that they believe that's why the story has gotten so much attention.
Newly famous gold-diggers: Is 'Dating A Banker Anonymous' a real thing, or did the New York Times get fooled? iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
Sometimes, you just get a feeling.
I've been around the Internet for a long time, and I know its terrifying tendency to reveal unpleasant swaths of humanity, and I've seen plenty -- plenty -- that's worse than the Dating A Banker Anonymous site that's recently been a hot topic of discussion in mainstream news outlets like The New York Times (under, I should add, the truly revolting headline "It's The Economy, Girlfriend") and online communities like Metafilter.
I've seen little that's been more instantly famous, mind you, but lots that's much, much worse.
These women already have not only haters, but defenders against haters, and nobody had even heard of them until Monday. Oh, and they might have a book deal.
And I had one question.
Isn't it totally obvious that this is a put-on? Isn't it totally obvious that the "support group" reported on in the Times doesn't exist, that these are three women -- two writers and an attorney -- who figured out how to tap our deep societal hatred of the recession and hatred of privileged women who get away with everything, and to combine it into a big giant phenomenon that would produce so much instant vitriol that they would absolutely, definitely get a book deal?
Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch blog has a new feature they're calling "ShePop," in which, according to the inaugural post, "we'll offer up a thinking woman's perspective on stuff that's wont to otherwise be shoved into a 'girly' corner. We'll discuss and debate everything that inspires us, enrages us, or even makes us laugh."
That opening post? Jessica Simpson looks fat in those pants. Yes, there's a taste of the "internet discussion" angle, going for a social-critic perspective, but it's not getting the job done for me, especially given that there are no fewer than four allegedly unflattering pictures included with the post -- three more than you could ever need to open a meta-discussion of why people won't stop talking about Jessica Simpson's weight. Maybe could have found something for the first day that's crying out a little more desperately for a "thinking woman's perspective."
This just...made me feel good. Robbie went to New York for three weeks, during which he took more than 3,000 photos, which he mixed with Noah And The Whale's "Shape Of My Heart" to make this video. It's hard to capture vacations, and even harder to capture New York, but with its combination of tourist elements and the ordinary stuff in between, this comes close.
Superheroes: This fellow is only a good blurb away from joining the ranks of our unofficial saviors of the streets. iStockphoto.com
by Marc Hirsh
There's been a lot of talk in the past year about how we're in the middle of a cinematic superhero boom. But what's gone mostly unnoticed is that the two most successful films in this supposed trend — The Dark Knight and Iron Man — don't technically involve superpowers at all.
Batman augments intense fight training with fancy gadgets and psychological gamesmanship, remember? And Iron Man is just a dude who solved a particularly tricky engineering problem.
Even the costumed crimefighters of the eagerly anticipated Watchmen have no actual extra-human abilities. (What about omnipotent physics-experiment-gone-awry Doctor Manhattan, you ask? Well, he doesn't wear a costume, silly.)
Does this say something profound about the current American zeitgeist? Who cares? But it means wonders for you, Everyday Person In The Natural World!
Sure, you might not be able to fly or stop bullets or have multiple conversations in multiple timelines on multiple planets, but you can certainly throw on a cape and a mask in the hopes of striking fear in the hearts of evildoers. (Although it's important to remember: you still can't stop bullets.)
And it turns out that a number of folks have been doing exactly that. We know this thanks to the fine people at the World Superhero Registry. Here you'll find profiles of confirmed and semi-confirmed folks with slick monikers and stylized duds (and the occasional severe Rorschach complex) trying to make a difference on the streets.
The Registry gives a quick summary of a number of real-life superheroes, listing "Region" and "Identity" but not, sad to say, "Powers." Wouldn't you scroll down in the vain, irrational hope of seeing it followed by anything other than the word "None," just once?
Five of the greatest self-appointed superheroes we found, after the jump...
The Far Side lives: Contributors to a Flickr pool act out their favorite cartoons, to sometimes arresting effect. Photo illustration by The Rocketeer, via Flickr.
Gary Larson's The Far Side ran new strips from 1980 to 1994, but the nearly 15 years that have passed since he retired haven't quieted fans, who find their own interesting ways to pay tribute.
Currently circling the internet is the Far Side Reenactments Flickr pool, a collection of photos and illustrations from different contributors acting out their favorite Far Side panels. Above is The Rocketeer's version of this strip, in which the big, bloodshot eyeball is closer than it appears.
If you enjoy -- or do not enjoy -- a Randy Newman movie title song (like the Toy Story tune he's performing above), you'll definitely enjoy 25 Days Of Newman, a project where two comics are producing a new (sort of) Newmanesque movie title song every day.
At the extremely orchestrated, extremely annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, those rascals at the Cartoon Network managed to Rickroll a crowd of millions, both in person and via the live broadcast on NBC.
If you're not familiar with the concept of Rickrolling, there's a good primer here. Basically, it's a fun but aging Internet meme -- an endlessly perpetuating prank that tricks people into watching a full-screen, full-volume version of Rick Astley's 1987 video, "Never Going to Give You Up."
More on Rickrolling, The Man, and how a meme dies, after the jump...
Holidays are made for family, ritual, and special episodes of television shows. Fortunately for all of us, Joost has gathered a bunch of Thanksgiving episodes in one place, meaning that if you wanted to, you could avoid your relatives for many, many hours without attracting attention to yourself. ("Gotta work," you could say, while hauling your laptop into a corner, plugging in your headphones, and enjoying the episode of Family Ties where Steven and Elyse get arrested on Thanksgiving.)
Joost is sort of like Hulu, with the disadvantages that the interface isn't as good, and the site requires you to sign up with an email address (everyone should have a free email account for exactly this kind of thing). The signup is easy, though, and once you're in the door, you can enjoy their Very Special Episodes, including -- seen above -- "The Late Thanksgiving," the episode of Friends where Rachel and Phoebe take baby Emma to the beauty pageant.
What's there, and what's missing, after the jump...
The President-Elect: Can't get enough facts about him, even if you have to write them yourself? We're here to help. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
by Glenn McDonald
The UK Telegraph recently ran an intriguing piece called "Barack Obama: The 50 facts you might not know." As you may be aware, a certain percentage of Europeans -- the technical term is Pretty Much Everybody, I think -- was overjoyed at the notion of an Obama presidency. So the list runs down some rather endearing facts about our next president.
For instance, he collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics. His favorite music includes Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Bach and The Fugees. And he took Michelle to see the Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing on their first date. (All true.) (According to the Telegraph, anyway.)
Here at NPR HQ, we decided to apply our vast editorial (and, um, creative) resources to the task, and have come up with a bonus 25 More Facts You Might Not Know About Barack Obama.
- He can not only turn water into wine; he turns it into 1787 Chateau Lafite.
- A renowned spot shooter at Chicago pick-up basketball games, his specialty is a 3-pointer made by bouncing the ball off Mayor Richard M. Daley's forehead.
- His tears can regenerate severed limbs.
- Whenever a Republican strategist cries, Obama gets $10 richer, somehow.
A lot more facts we totally do not stand behind, after the jump...
Roger Ebert: Despite some hard times, the guy (seen here with his wife Chaz) has been trying out a more mischievous, free-form sort of writing, and this time, he wants to tell you about rice cookers -- and it's pretty great. Bryan Bedder/Getty Images
by Marc Hirsh
Roger Ebert's blog isn't exactly breaking news -- it was recently named the second-best-written blog on the Internet by this site -- but if you haven't checked out "The Pot And How To Use It," then you're in for a treat. (Literally, perhaps, if you're a read-along-and-do kind of person.)
More about the many things Roger Ebert can teach you, after the jump...
Hands-on guy: Darren Lynn Bousman (foreground, with actress Alexa Vega) is putting personal time into the online marketing of his latest movie. He hopes Repo! The Genetic Opera will inspire a Rocky Horror-style cult. Photo: Steve Wilkie
by Beth Accomando
When Darren Lynn Bousman makes a movie, he usually gets a marketing budget. (Duh: he's responsible for three of the five installments in the highly successful Saw franchise.)
But with Repo! The Genetic Opera, he essentially had no money to promote the film. And in an odd way, that's turned out to be a plus.
It's meant that Bousman has had to turn to the Internet, which costs him nothing but his time.
Connecting with the fans, generating a buzz, after the jump ...
We've lost Studs Terkel, that magnificent animal. You'll find Cheryl Corley's story on him over here.
And because there's no point in parochialism at times like this, I want to make sure you see this, from the Chicago Tribune:
There's much more, including several more videos, from the Tribune on this page.
Need more? Try Studs On a Soapbox, a half-hour bio that originally aired on WTTW's "Chicago Stories" back in 2000. (Credit Tom Weinberg and the online video archive MediaBurn.)
And because no good sendoff is complete without a little Patti LaBelle, here's the number "Cleanin' Women," from the Broadway musical based on Terkel's quietly marvelous here's-what-we-do-all-day book Working. This take is from a 90-minute version that aired on PBS in 1982, in the first season of American Playhouse:
A quick oldie-but-goodie for those who have never played: Guess The Dictator Or Sit-com Character. Surprise yourself with the small number of questions required to guess that you are an obscure character! Analyze your life by answering as yourself and seeing which character you most resemble!
This game has been kicking around for years, so it's been honed pretty carefully...except for spelling. So consider yourself warned.
Garfield Minus Garfield: Without Garfield's retorts about how glad he is the day is over, things look a little more bleak. Ballantine Books
by Laurel Maury
Early in 2008, Irishman Dan Walsh started posting online copies online of Garfield -- with Garfield removed. The goofy, 30-year-old comic strip featuring the lasagna-loving tabby and Jon Arbuckle, his girlfriend-less owner, has been adored since the early '80s. Without the cat, a dark humor emerged that resonated through the growing world of webcomics. Within a few months, www.garfieldminusgarfield.net was receiving 500,000 hits a day.
Garfield creator Jim Davis became a fan and asked Walsh to work on a book. Now accompanying the rather lavish Garfield: 30 Years of Laughs and Lasagna, by Jim Davis is a small green book, Garfield Minus Garfield.
How the project started, how the fan mail looks, and teaming up with Jim Davis, after the jump...
If you're among the many people who miss the days when MTV showed videos all day instead of reruns of The Hills and My Super Sweet 16, you may be heartened by the launch of MTV Music, where you can go and choose from a fairly substantial library of videos to watch online. Contrary to some of the suggestions I've read, it certainly doesn't contain every video MTV ever showed -- more on that later -- but it includes some good ones, and certainly enough to perk up your Wednesday, if you're flagging. Up there is the 1983 "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" video where many folks first discovered the unusual Annie Lennox.
Somebody really put a lot of work into this remarkable video, which rather powerfully suggests a certain lack of spontaneity in the three presidential debates. By which I mean, "It will really make you feel like you could have spent two out of three of them doing something else."
Hero worship: Former Spider-Man writer J. Michael Straczynski is busy talking up his film Changeling this week, but that won't stop our comics guys from talking up his funnybook-world fame. Tony Rivetti Jr./Universal Pictures
by Trey Graham
Today on Morning Edition, NPR's Elizabeth Blair talks about the true story behind the new film Changeling with screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski -- who'll be better known to many Monkey See readers as the creator of TV's Babylon 5 and a longtime writer for Marvel Comics' The Amazing Spider-Man.
Wait, did somebody mention a superhero? Cue Monkey See's funnybook blogger Glen Weldon. Glen came down to the mothership earlier this week for an in-studio chat.
Joining him: fellow Marvel geek Jim Lesher, who works on NPR's Operations Desk. (The Ops crew keeps us plugged into the rest of the world, keeps us from fighting over studio time, handles logistics for remote broadcasts, and much more.)
And you know how it is when you put a couple of, ahem, enthusiasts in front of a microphone. Elizabeth asked two, maybe three questions, and the guys were off to the races.
Among the topics: 9/11 in the Marvel universe, Babylon 5 and what it taught TV about the Internet, and the Spider-Man storyline that drove Straczynski out of his skull. Plus: Comics-specific audio extras -- stuff you won't hear in the Morning Edition story -- taken from Blair's interview with Straczynski.
The result? Click the play button above, and hear for yourself.
This uparallelled YouTube treasure just popped up on my Facebook page, courtesy of an actor I know. I've played it four times now, and I'm thinking my day will involve another six or seven listens, minimum:
Looks like it's been up on the Tubes for about a year and a half, in which time it's racked up a mere 103,000 plays. Surely it deserves better than that, no? I mean, who'd have thought to mash those two up?
Computer love: What would Princess Leia write to Han Solo? iStockphoto.com
by Glenn McDonald
Word is getting around about Google's new Mail Goggles add-on, which is designed to prevent the drunken late-night phenomenon known as the Instantly Regretted E-Mail. When activated, the Mail Goggles program requires users to answer a few math questions -- a kind of virtual sobriety test -- before any outgoing emails can be sent.
It's genius, frankly, and it inspired me to revisit something I wrote a while ago about what might happen if some of cinema's famous couples had had access to e-mail. Were all of these missives written sober? Would they survive the math-question test?
+++
From: Lloyd_Dobler@nc.rr.com
To: Diane.Court@yahoo.uk.co
Subject: In Your Eyes
Hi Diane, it's me, Lloyd. Lloyd Dobler. Found your blog via Google. I promised myself I'd never write you again, but you know. I dunno. Maybe I didn't really know you. Maybe you were just a mirage. Maybe the world is full of food and sex and spectacle and we're all just hurling towards an apocalypse, in which case it's not your fault. Did I say that already? Anyway, I've been thinking about all these things. Also, I'm drunk.
I just want you to know that I really do hope you are happy in your new life. In London. With whatsisname. I mean it, I really do. Good old stupid puppy dog idiot Lloyd. Look where it's gotten me. Remember when I said I didn't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career? Or sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed? Guess what I do now. I buy and sell computer processors. My life is a cruel joke.
What else can I tell you? I gave up kickboxing after a sparring accident--lost partial vision in my left eye. I can't listen to Peter Gabriel without throwing up. I still hang out at the Gas 'n Sip. I'd love to hear back from you, Diane. I wish you were here, wish I could talk to you again. Write back. Say something. Anything.
Lloyd
What came after the Battle Of Endor and more, after the jump...
Today in Dogs in Wigs: Jumpy adolescent felines and buzzy electric toothbrushes -- two phenomena that were more or less made for each other. Hat tip: FishbowlDC.
Marlon Brando in The Godfather: The greatest movie ever? A new list is here for all your fight-starting needs.
Paramount Pictures, Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
• Can't get enough lists? Can't get enough official reminders that you should see The Godfather? In what it's calling "the most ambitious movie poll ever conducted," Empire has a new list of the 500 Greatest Movies Of All Time, voted on by readers, critics, and "150 of Hollywood's finest." Start your quibbles! (I'll start by quibbling with the idea that On The Town (#277) is less great than A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (#265).)
• Does the embrace of video games mean the abandonment of reading? Some librarians and gamers say no. And when an official from the New York Public Library says that "reading is no longer just in the traditional sense of reading words in English or another language on a paper," well, we say the times, they are a-changing.
Seniors at the symphony and a stupendous video, after the jump ...
What's fun on Friday? Debate humor! Saturday Night Live has an odd tendency to excel in particular areas while tanking in others, and one of its strengths has been -- oddly -- debate sketches.
The clip above features Dana Carvey's George H.W. Bush (before it got over-exaggerated) and Jon Lovitz's Michael Dukakis (which came down to one highly quotable line).
But the secret weapon is Jan Hooks as Diane Sawyer -- because Diane Sawyer is exactly like that, with that winking, smiling, syrupy delivery and all that reveling in the discomfort of others.
More debates, and a prediction about the weekend, after the jump ...
Or at least sue them first: That's what RealNetworks is doing.
RealNetworks beat the movie studios to court; yesterday, the digital-media company brought a lawsuit against Hollywood studios, asking a court to declare preemptively that its RealDVD software does not violate any copyright laws.
The software allows movie fans to make a copy of a movie from a DVD and store it on their computer hard drive. That would be nice for travelers -- no stack of DVDs to carry on the plane -- and for parents, who could plop their kids in front of screen in the back seat without searching through a stack of discs first.
RealNetworks claims that its software doesn't break through any encryption on the DVDs for its software to work. (Cracking encryption would be a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.)
Still, it wasn't much of a surprise when, a few hours after RealNetworks' move, the Motion Picture Association of America brought a suit of its own.
The MPAA wants a temporary restraining order to keep RealDVD off the market while the parties tussle over it in court. They worry about people making copies of rented DVDs that they don't own.
You could write a boring book — or a boring blog post, for that matter — about the countless ways the decline of the music industry has affected the way we listen to music. Record stores are disappearing, MP3 downloads are replacing CDs, piracy runs rampant, label mergers have consolidated artists' catalogs into ever fewer hands, and so on.
If that paragraph hasn't caused you to nod off like a herdsman bitten by a tsetse fly, perhaps you'll join me for a moment as I lament the decline of the CD release party, that wonderful byproduct of record stores that allows like-minded fans to gather in person and hear a much-anticipated album for the first time.
What any of this nonsense has to do with Bob Dylan, after the jump ...
Right now, the day's No. 1 most-viewed YouTube video is David Letterman's 9-minute John McCain call-out from last night's show.
Backstory, in case you hadn't heard: McCain canceled a scheduled Letterman appearance because (to paraphrase Letterman quoting McCain) he had to rush back to Washington to work out the financial crisis.
In the video, Letterman expresses his admiration for McCain ... and then rips into him over and over and over, continuing even as he brings in guest Keith Olbermann and cuts to McCain, who turns out to be not on a plane to D.C., but in a studio with Letterman's CBS colleague Katie Couric.
This video was on more than half of the blogs in my RSS feed today. Did you watch it on TV last night? Or was there a link in your inbox this morning? What's so compelling about it?
Tonight is probably my most anticipated night of the fall season. Ugly Betty, The Office, and Survivor all return, and those are all good shows.
Grey's Anatomy is back, too, and that's at least an interesting phenomenon. And while My Name Is Earl isn't something I watch consistently, Seth Green is dropping by for that show's return, so that can't be too bad.
Survivor doesn't require any catching up, since it starts fresh with every season, but if you need to catch up on anything else, Hulu can offer you the last few episodes of The Office and My Name Is Earl, while ABC has the last few Ugly Bettys streaming on its site. (That's a clip from the season finale of The Office at the top of the post.)
It's as good a time as any, I suppose, to mention that if you've never poked around at Hulu -- a News Corp.-NBC Universal streaming-video joint venture -- it's worth a look. In addition to clips and full episodes from lots of current shows (largely, but not entirely, from NBC and Fox), it offers movies, vintage TV shows and specials too. (It's the one place you can still see Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog free -- though supported by a few ads).
Buffy, David E. Kelley, football, and five great clips, after the jump...
Richard Wong's indie debut earned him a collaboration with a Hollywood veteran.
Colma, Calif., a fog-enshrouded city where the dead outnumber the living, is not a likely place to start a film career. But that didn't daunt Richard Wong.
He turned the sleepy town into the backdrop for his vibrant 2006 self-financed debut, Colma: The Musical. The film's brash spirit appealed to veteran filmmaker Wayne Wang, who was looking for a young director to partner with on an upcoming film project.
Frighteningly alike: Nanna Ingvarsson and her Invasion double.
Photo: Mara Majorowicz/Courtesy Nanna Ingvarsson
When you write about theater, which I do sometimes, you occasionally find yourself taken aback when you head out to the movies: An actor you know from his distinguished work in, say, the August Wilson plays will turn up playing a character named 'Strange' Sex Addict in a John Waters film.
This happens a lot, actually, here in D.C., where there's a thriving theater scene -- and plenty of big-budget movies shooting on location and looking for bit players.
But not every moonlighting actor gets to have a life-size, screaming body-double doll. And not everyone who does get a life-size, screaming body-double doll has the presence of mind to get pictures of it to put on her Facebook page.
Life-size, screaming doll explained, after the jump ...
It's not easy being a documentary filmmaker. Getting the pictures made is hard; finding distribution can be even harder.
Enter Snagfilms.com. It's a Web site that offers hundreds of documentaries for free viewing. You can also "snag" the movies, embedding them in your blog, social-media page or Web site.
This is not YouTube material. These are full-length films from PBS, National Geographic, independent filmmakers and others. (For those of you interested in such things, each movie contains 90 seconds per hour of advertising. The filmmakers get a cut.)
This week, to honor the 9/11 anniversary, Snagfilms is offering a slate of six 9/11-themed feature films (with no advertising).
The most prominent: 7 Days in September, which recreates the experience of New Yorkers in the week following the attacks. It's a moving portrait, especially for anyone who lived through the events.
When superstar New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady suffered a knee injury on Sunday, his season was lost, but many YouTube videos were born.
In the above, Brady is hit over and over again ("Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!") as the screen mournfully declares, "Tom Brady has a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee."
More tribute videos, in which creative amateurs show off their Tom Brady-loving skills at a professional level, after the jump ...
And legendary New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia tried it way before, when he read comics on WNYC during a 1940s newspaper strike.
This being the 21st century and all, we're giving you the chance to out-caption the six-time Emmy winner. Below are a couple of caption-less cartoons just begging for, well, captions; leave your suggestions in the comments section, and we might use your submissions for future on-air pieces.
Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading: Will star power — and/or that great shot of him running on the treadmill — help the film cut through the glut?
Focus Features
The fall TV season is finally getting underway, and while it may not bring greatness, it will bring an end to the worst of the summer fare. (Fare thee well, Greatest American Dog!) We're climbing out of the August blues at the movies, too. So it's as good a time as any to pause for a roundup of interesting happenings:
• The Wall Street Journal posits today that the real problem at the movies is that too much is being produced, leaving no room for anything to succeed. Isn't the market for film destined to splinter just like the market for television, once distribution channels catch up? Is this a glut, or is the market just getting more niche-oriented? Isn't this partly a result of the insistence on packing everything potentially award-winning into the late part of the year, packing everything blockbuster-ish into the summer, and leaving the rest of the calendar to rot?
More culture bites, including Stevie Wonder, David Letterman, and challenging All Songs Considered to a duel, after the jump ...
Alison Bechdel introduced her readers to 'The Rule' in 1985. Read on for more; click here to see the whole strip and hear the All Things Considered story.
Alison Bechdel/Courtesy Firebrand Books
Americans watch an average of five hours of TV a day — but how much of it is actually good? Twenty-three years ago, cartoonist Alison Bechdel had one of her female characters cite a simple rule: She'd only go to see a movie if it had:
1. At least two female characters, who ...
2. talk to each other about...
3. something besides a man.
It became known as The Bechdel Rule. It seemed like such a simple idea -- and it still resonates, because it articulates something often missing in popular culture.
More Bechdel, more rules — yours included — after the jump...
"Yeah, I used to read mysteries, but I found the plots a little fishy." "Speaking of a little fishy, want to grab a bite to eat?"
iStockphoto.com
Ever since The New York Times ran a piece in March about dumping prospective suitors because of what they read (or don't read), there's been more talk than usual about the way literary tastes may influence our choice of romantic partners.
Now, inevitably, a publisher has started a dating site where you can search for people to date who read the same books you do.
Discouraged by love? Saddened beyond anyone's ability to console you? PenguinDating is there to help you find that Proust-reading person of your dreams.
The pleasures and perils of PenguinDating, after the jump ...
Cher: Clearly too understated to play Catwoman.
Bertrand Guay, AFP/Getty Images
• Cinematical and Vulture have both expressed skepticism about rumors that Cher is going to play Catwoman in Christopher Nolan's next Batman movie. I, for one, would enjoy seeing Catwoman wearing duct tape and a sailor hat. It wouldn't really be any sillier than what Batman wears.
Censorship debates, unexpected convention blogs, and potentially scandalous fall television, after the jump...
Only one of these candies can be the greatest of them all.
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Well, it's not about movies, exactly, but it is from Roger Ebert. The letters section on Ebert's blog includes a gem from a gentleman named R. Crutch, who explains that he is investigating candy with an evolutionary perspective:
Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.
Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them breaks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.
I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior... .
I love a cute kid, and a happy kid, and a talented kid, and a kid with a feel for music, and here, you have all those things in one ten-year-old, performing the opening number of the Tony-Award-winning In The Heights.
(Be sure to check out the comment from Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the show. Sure, it could be a fake, but anybody who went to the trouble to fake that comment would do something a little more attention-seeking -- that low-key high-five has the ring of truth to me.)
It is one of my theories of the Internet that all blogs must carefully limit posts that fall into a category I call "Dogs In Wigs."
This is a post that consists, essentially, of a statement akin to "Here is a picture of a dog in a wig." And you click on it, and indeed, it is a picture of a dog in a wig.
"Ho-ho," you say, "that is certainly a dog, and it is certainly wearing a wig." And then you go back to whatever you were previously doing, resisting (or choosing not to resist) the urge to send someone you know a message with the subject line, "FW: Dog in wig!"
Examples of "Dogs in Wigs" would include the famous Peanut Butter Jelly Time video, the wonderful Cats In Sinks, and the astonishing Dance Party Friday, wherein the early-morning traffic reporters at one Cincinnati TV station bust an end-of-the-week move if, as often happens, there's no traffic to report on when their first segment airs at 5:45 a.m.
Don't get me wrong: the Internet would not be what it is without dogs in wigs. You just have to be careful with them, because there are only so many of them that one can tolerate before a limit is reached — sometimes abruptly — and you begin to feel that you are under siege by a flood of e-mails sent by your least amusing relative.
Webcomics: We like 'em. 
Wil Wheaton: Just one of the feeds you can follow without grinding your teeth. 
Grey's Anatomy: Just one of the ABC shows on its way to Hulu. But does it matter? 
The Twitter hashtag: See this bullhorn? The hashtag is a little like this. Just ask Amazon. 
Very bad ideas: "Don't you want to eat this cupcake? Don't you? Don't you? Huh? Huh?" 
A different kind of vigilante: If you're on the New York City subway, look out for the guy snapping photos over his crutches. 
The Facebook redesign: The company promises changes, but is it too little too late? 
The blog debate: Variety may be responsible for a debate better than it entirely deserves. 
Internet land mines: Do you recognize these guys? They are #7 on the list. 
Facebook updates: Is this the reason you never joined the Peace Corps? 
Newly famous gold-diggers: Is 'Dating A Banker Anonymous' a real thing, or did the New York Times get fooled? 
Superheroes: This fellow is only a good blurb away from joining the ranks of our unofficial saviors of the streets. 
The Far Side lives: Contributors to a Flickr pool act out their favorite cartoons, to sometimes arresting effect. 
The President-Elect: Can't get enough facts about him, even if you have to write them yourself? We're here to help. 
Roger Ebert: Despite some hard times, the guy (seen here with his wife Chaz) has been trying out a more mischievous, free-form sort of writing, and this time, he wants to tell you about rice cookers -- and it's pretty great. 
Hands-on guy: Darren Lynn Bousman (foreground, with actress Alexa Vega) is putting personal time into the online marketing of his latest movie. He hopes Repo! The Genetic Opera will inspire a Rocky Horror-style cult. 
Garfield Minus Garfield: Without Garfield's retorts about how glad he is the day is over, things look a little more bleak. 
Hero worship: Former Spider-Man writer J. Michael Straczynski is busy talking up his film Changeling this week, but that won't stop our comics guys from talking up his funnybook-world fame. 
Computer love: What would Princess Leia write to Han Solo? 
