Monthly Archives: January 2010

Boob Tubery, Videocracy

YouTubery Friday: Charlie Brooker and The Craziest Video Ever

It’s Friday! Procrastinate and count down to happy hour with these lovely bits!

Several friends of mine on the The Twitter and The Facebook posted a link to this video yesterday. It’s British funnyman/commentator Charlie Brooker showing the essential elements needed in any news segment. Though this was done on the other side of the pond, it’s clear that such rules transcend borders.

This reminded me, Hey, Charlie Brooker’s pretty damn funny! Brooker hosts Newswipe on BBC4 (yes, there’s four of them now) and is known for his adept, savage skewering of the media. I know the word skewering is tossed off every time someone takes shots at The Boob Tube, but Brooker’s pieces are truly worthy of that adjective. Think of Jon Stewart in his best moments of righteous indignation, but angrier and more Cockney.

Like his take on American news media, pitched at a British audience blissfully unfamiliar with the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck.

Brooker can be just as good when going after less serious topics, as in this clip, where he lists “The 10 Biggest Cocks in Advertising”. (Cock = douche, jerk, etc. He’s not naming the 10 Biggest Cocks in the Greg Oden sense.) I’m not really familiar with most of these ads, but Brooker tears them apart so well–in ways both clever and silly–that it doesn’t matter. Funny is funny.

Or this spot-on (as the Brits say) takedown of MTV’s My Sweet 16. “I think this might be an Al Qaeda recruitment video.”

Just a brief sampling of the peeved hilarity Mr. Brooker has to offer. You could spend hours watching his collected works on the YouTubes. So go ahead! It’s only Friday. C’mon, you checked out of work by lunch on Wednesday, didn’t you?

Finally, Aziz Ansari posted a video on his web site that is, no joke, the craziest thing you will probably ever see. I cannot embed it, so you’ll have to click there and take my word for it.

The video is an pregame intro for an Alaskan collegiate hockey team, featuring their CGI polar bear mascot. It is not cheap, tossed-off CGI. If anything, this video is a little too well done. I will not ruin any of the madness for you. Suffice to say that, if you took Chuck Norris and The Punisher, and multiplied them by infinity, then multiplied them by INSANITY, they would still look like pussies compared to this polar bear.

Cinematics, Tuneage

Variety Chronicles Frank Sinatra’s Failed Biker Movie, Part 3

Part 1   *   Part 2

frank_biker_3.jpg

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: Pitchersandcatchersreport.com

One of the most fun/excruciating parts of the baseball offseason is wondering just how many days are left until the season begins anew. Wonder no more!

Evan “Funk” Davies, the awesome WFMU DJ who spins every Tuesday at 11pm, alerted me via tweet to an extremely simple webbed site that will inform you exactly how much longer we must wait. The site is called Pitchersandcatchersreport.com, and it’s about as bare-bones as a site can get. But it does what it says: Tells you exactly how many days remain on the calendar before pitchers and catchers report to spring training. It also has countdowns for when all players report and Opening Day. So just bookmark that and keep checking it until the number hits 0.

In case you’re much too busy to look at the site (but not busy enough to read this one), as of today, there are 16 more days until pitchers and catchers report to spring training, 19 until all players report, and 67 until Opening Day. As my body thaws out from a walk-heavy commute in single digit wind chills, that is a warming thought.

UPDATE: As Mr. Davies pointed out in the comments, this site may be off (as in, it probably is). Unless they’re using some New Math I don’t know about. Whatevs. LET ME THINK IT’S ONLY 16 DAYS UNTIL SPRING TRAINING. TELL ME SWEET LITTLE LIES.