Unrest - Make Out Club

Unrest - Make Out Club

Johnny's Mom

This video literally made me speechless. So many questions:

What the hell is noon happy hour? 27 bottles of scotch? There's someone older than John McCain?! Is it really Skeletor's mom?

Byron Crawford blows it up

And it’s not like he has to sweat losing the black community at this point. He’s got them (us?) in his back pocket on a level I wasn’t even aware was possible. Pimps don’t have this control over their whores. Never mind throwing his pastor under a bus; Barack Obama could shoot a black baby in its face on live TV, and black people would be like, “Well, maybe that’s what he needed to do to win the election. Let the nigga get in office first and see if he’s still shooting children.” That’s how ridiculous this shit has gotten.

Daaaaaaaammmmmn!

Smoking bans kill

According to researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, counties that have instituted bans on smoking indoors have experienced dramatic increases in the levels of drunk driving and drunk driving deaths. Apparently drunk smokers are hopping into their cars to drink in outdoor bars or to adjacent counties without smoking bans. The bottle opener/lighter combination that the dealer for my first car gave me must be catching on.

The researchers analysed data from 120 American counties, 20 of which had banned smoking. They found a smoking ban increased fatal alcohol-related car accidents by 13% in a typical county containing 680,000 people. This is the equivalent of 2.5 fatal accidents (equivalent to approximately six deaths). Furthermore, drunk-driving smokers have not changed their ways over time. In areas where the ban has been in place for longer than 18 months, the increased accident rate is 19%.

I'm curios as to what percentage of accidents are being caused by drunk drivers dropping their car cigarette lighters in their laps? But let's look on the bright side! Smokers are now doing more to improve the costs of healthcare for everyone else, by killing people off before they get sick.

Unlucky Strikes

OMG! Kids have money, love text messaging

A spat of upcoming ad campaigns, including Degree deodorant for teen girl's "OMG! Moments," are going to feature text-messaging slang marketed at the youth of America. Since parents clearly don't understand what the hell their kids are talking about these days anyway (note the success of Juno: "They talk so funny!"), companies figure that they might as well go straight to the source and try to stay fresh and fly with the kids. Are kids still saying fresh and fly?

"We wanted to show the teens that we understand them and know how they communicate with their friends," says David Lang, president of WPP Group's MindShare Entertainment, which created the print, TV and online effort.

Marketers Try to Be 'Kewl' With Text-Message Lingo

Nerds (ruining the fun for everybody)

Two brave citizens have mounted a legal campaign to prevent nerds and their particle physics toys from destroying the earth in a black hole fueled apocalypse. Global warming can hop on the back burner for this shit.

Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

Bummer.

Kids love internet, hate magazines

Looks like the inevitable pool of young talent for the magazine industry is drying up as the young people these days flock to that new fangled internet. Is this really surprising? Why spend hours researching and interviewing for a piece that just gets axed or edited beyond all recognition when you could, ya know, just hunt for sexual innuendo headlines on the NYT and Google pictures of dinosaur bongs. It's a recession, there's nothing out there for ya anyway.

Mr. Talese had definite opinions on the subject. 'These people don’t leave their fucking laptops,' he said. 'It used to be, you would go outside. It’s leaving home, getting on a plane or a bus or a bicycle, and going somewhere. It doesn’t mean you have a fixed interview. It’s hanging around.'

The Decline and Fall of the Writer

The New York Post is the Best 'Newspaper' Ever

Ike Turner obituary

Best Sentence of the Day

"Maybe it is the lasting memory of the gay icon Elizabeth Taylor's scandalous affair with Richard Burton during his filming of “Night of the Iguana” in the early 60's, but Puerto Vallarta is becoming gayer by the year . . . " - New York Times, Top 53 Places to Go in 2008

WTF: Brian Wilson

I knew Brian Wilson was batshit crazy, but this reaches a whole new level. This is some post-McCartney "Temporary Secretary" type shit right here.

Brian Wilson - "Smart Girls"

Big brains are awesome dude!

Middle-Aged White Ladies Love Obama

Latest Iowa campaign ad from democratic superstar Barack Obama. Hey look, those oldish white ladies are getting all teary eyed! Aw, that's adorable. What's a 55-year old housewife from Iowa to do when she has to chose between a female candidate and the will of Oprah? Oprah singlehandedly turns books in literary canon people! Vice presidential nod?

Obama's pumping the "not politics as usual message" like it's a pair of '91 Reeboks.

Dee Brown! Siiiiiick!

Come on Obama, don't you know that being the "change"candidate is the oldest trick in the American election books. I'm pretty sure George Washington ran on that platform in 1789 when he ran against the petticoats and wigs platform of King George.

American Apparel Loves Naked Chicks

American Apparel has finally released an ad with a young naked girl in it. Now that their clothing line has come to its dialectical conclusion what's next for the company? I'm going with American Apparel birth control pills.

British People Love Drinking

Apparently employees being hungover and skipping work during the holiday season will cost British firms £790m this year. The clear solution, move the office to the pub! Nothing cures a hangover like a double scotch. Cheers!

Writers Strike

Does scripted reality television still get made when writers go on strike? If not, as opposed to showing repeats they should really just run with this idea of replacing characters with celebrity reenactors. Also, I hope James Franco keeps the wig.

Books go digital

E-Ink is the wave of the future. I'm actually pretty psyched about this. Being able to carry a library on you with less weight than a single book. I can get down with that. Actually being able to read something in an electronic format without it being backlit. I can definitely get down with that. You should get on this shit and let me know how it works for ya so I can pick up version 2.0.

Oblique Strategies

Maybe you should try faking it!

The International Tweexcore Underground

?????

Pimp my credit

Once again the world of advertising has left me speechless. Revise the history books. It's the Credit Pimp's America, we're just visiting.

Brussels

I'm leaving on a 4 1/2 month trip to Brussels on Friday. What does the mean for the quantity and content of the postings? Anyways, you should keep reading Candyvan. Who knows! But if worse comes to worse I'll just post a bunch of pictures of the different outfits of the Manneken Pis.