Kate Sheppard [of Mother Jones] was at the fake US Chamber of Commerce press conference in DC where a Yes Man, posing as a Chamber rep, claimed the Chamber was reversing its draconian position on climate change, which has caused lots of big Chamber members -- Apple, Nike, Exelon, and others -- to quit the national business group. But then a REAL Chamber PR man arrived at the meeting to declare it a fraud. (And Sheppard ended up on Maddow that night).
Today, Sheppard reports that the Chamber is suing its impersonators: "The defendants are not merry pranksters tweaking the establishment," the Chamber said in a press release issued with the suit. "Instead, they deliberately broke the law in order to further commercial interest in their books, movies, and other merchandise."
Above: A recently-discovered alternative version of the song "I Will" from The Beatles' White Album (1968), originally deemed too controversial to be included on the release. This rare track was remastered by audio engineer Peter Serafinowicz.
Just how would one construct a Glenn Beck Halloween Mask using little more than an adult diaper and a printout from these very internets? Ethan Persoff of "Comics With Problems" fame would be happy to show you how. WARNING: site contains disturbing images of Glenn Beck's face, and a photo of a fellow (not Glenn Beck) lying on a couch wearing nothing but a Glenn Beck Diaper Mask over his visage and yet another Glenn Beck Diaper over his manparts. WHICH OF THESE IMAGES IS MORE UNSETTLING? Why don't you tell me in the comments. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Aman Ali, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the co-author of 30 Mosques, a Ramadan adventure taking him to a different mosque in New York City every day for a month.
I'll spare you guys the annoyance of raving about how good the TV show Mad Men is. But now apparently Sesame Street has gotten Mad Men fever. My friend's 3-year-old son saw the clip and said he wants to grow up and be like Don Draper. I said "You and me both kid, you and me both."
Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He currently resides in Harlem, New York.
A dramatic reading of tweets. The guy reading Lohan is the best. Who do you think should be read next? (thanks James, No You First)
(Bill Gurstelle is guest blogging here on Boing Boing. He is the
author of several books including the potato cannon-relevant Backyard
Ballistics, and the recently-published Absinthe
and Flamethrowers)
Everybody's talking about the honorable Marilyn Milian, the hottest judge on television! --Opening tagline for the television show "The People's Court"
I've been watching a lot of TV judge shows lately, mainly because I don't have cable, they're on when I'm working on Make Magazine projects in my workshop, they're good background noise, and hey, they're marginally better than Maury Povich or Deal or No Deal.
I'm no connoisseur of small claims court television, but I do have opinions. I kind of like Judge Joe Brown, because he frequently does weird things with his voice. He'll be lecturing someone for trashing their roommates CD collection when mid-sentence, he switches to a deep, over-the-top, musical baritone for no reason at all. Sort of like Steve Bochco's Cop Rock show.
Judge "Christina's Court" Perez's tag line is that she "takes law into her own heart." I have absolutely no earthly idea what that means.
Anyway, if what daytime TV viewers are seeking is hot, sexy justice, then it's time for a new concept altogether. Maybe a show where the judge wears a tight fitting black leather robe and carries a riding crop? At the end, the loser has to strip down to their underwear and the winner gets to yell stuff at them. Now that's hot. Copyright 2009. Feel free to call my hot, sexy agent with offers.
Hydroxatone is so effective, it was given away in gift bags at international film festivals!
- advertisement for Hydroxatone, a very expensive wrinkle cream flogged constantly on late night cable television and talk radio stations.
Allo! I am Marcel, zee scienteest in charge of gift bag quality control at ze large internationale film festivals. Every day, I am faced with ze daunting task of carefully evaluating the products of the thousands of companies eager to put free samples in the gift bags of Hollywood stars.
But only the best products, like Magic Jack or Almighty Cleanse make it through our rigorous, film-festival gift-bag quality control.
As hard as I try to safeguard ze integrity of our gift bags, sometimes the unfortunate occurs. One time, during a screening of Rochelle, Rochelle at Cannes, and against my better judgment, I allowed Kevin Trudeau to place inferior quality promotional ball point pens in ze gift bag. One of them leaked ink on Halle Barry's cashmere sweater. If Angelina Jolle had not taken the Shamwow from her gift bag and blotted up ink, mon Dieu, I would left be sweeping streets in Marseilles.
Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.
As we all learned in preschool, Muppets are native to New York City, and once freely roamed (in a floppy, yet oddly stiff-limbed sort of way) the whole of the five boroughs. Sadly, those days have passed. But now, kindly urban planning wonks are hoping that new, livable-streets initiatives can help the good old days return.
In the early part of the 1900s, Zozos - large, furry, innocent, purple creatures - once freely roamed New York City's streets, and were seen frequently mingling among its denizens and enjoying the public realm. But with the advent of the automobile their numbers slowly dwindled, until the 1930s when sightings became rare and they were thought to go extinct.
But now thanks to a burgeoning livable streets movement and a marked improvement in public spaces in NYC, Zozo sightings have been reported. World-renowned crypto-zoologist Donald Druthers has convinced us to document the facts - and yes, it looks like Zozos could be making a comeback! See the evidence for yourself."
Rex sez, "In light of the recent footage of police behaviour at the G20, I felt it was time to remix the current UK police poster campaign again. Original photo by David Byrne, as posted on BB by Xeni."
Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.
A disclaimer for the capitalist entertainment pellet above: This is a paid ad for Cheetos. This is also the 6th and final security bulletin from the long-lost Communist enclave of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. This ad allows Boing Boing Video to post all remaining content ad-free.
IN THIS EPISODE:
We proclaim victory over the extremist political enclave Soviet Unterzoegersdorf with this transmission, in which they announce their final protest against the "golden showers" of liberalism and threaten to take their plight to the United Nations.
IN COMPLETELY UNRELATED NEWS:
Ze good fellows at monochrom have developed a proletarian adventure game: Soviet Unterzogersdorf in which "a fictitious and misplaced handling of the past and present is put to use as a criticism of culture and collective memories."
Hmm... good bye FPSs, time for a does of meta-cultural exploration.
A disclaimer for the capitalist entertainment pellet above: This Boing Boing Video episode is a paid ad for Cheetos. This is also the 5th in a 6-part series (only one more left!) of security bulletins from the long-lost Communist enclave of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf.
IN THIS EPISODE:
Analysis completed. Agents realize they've been duped. Destruction commences.
(Archival footage note: footage in this episode includes a brief clip from 'Cartoon Control Room," an '80s public access show created by a guy named Tim Arnold. This footage is public domain, via archive.org. )
A disclaimer for the capitalist entertainment pellet above: This Boing Boing Videoepisode is a paid ad forCheetos. This is the third in a six-part series of security bulletins from the long-lost Communist enclave of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. Background on the series here. All other BBV episodes we're producing this month are ad-free. Neither Cheetos nor Federated Media, the agency that sells our video sponsorships, has seen what we're doing before we air it, and gave us pretty much zero editorial restrictions. With effectively no creative oversight, we went for the most irreverent and ridiculous option we had, and that meant monochrom.
IN THIS EPISODE:
Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Academy of Sciences agents analyze the contents of a box recently parachuted into the motherland from American capitalist swine. The box contains a substance that resembles pleasingly cheese-scented packing material, and yet -- there is nothing else inside. Agents attempt to isolate the secret ingredient inside that morphs cheese, corn, and boredom-killing antimatter. WHAT IT IS, COMRADES?
First things first: The Boing Boing Video episode above is a paid ad for Cheetos. It contains subliminal messages. For real. It is also a security bulletin produced 50 years ago in the future by the citizens of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, regarding the detection of a package containing mysterious, orange, cheesy particles presumed to be American in origin.
Normally we'd just run this as an ad alongside our editorial content, but I love it and there's a complicated story behind it, so we're running it on its own. Now, allow me to explain further. Warning, I am about to get all meta on your ass.
Boing Boing Video relies on sponsorships to do all of the weird, unfettered, free-speechy internetelevision you (hopefully) love us for. Cheetos approached us recently about sponsoring BB-V, in the form of six one-minute video ads we would create for them, which would run alongside regular BB-V episodes. They were remarkably hands-off and cool about the creative -- the only editorial guidance we received was pretty much: don't be mean (don't do anything involving Cheetos that would make someone cry, particularly kittens), and avoid anything having to do with sex, violence and drugs. While they did not specify this, I also figured Nazis, pedophiles, 4chan (see previous), or Hugo Chavez (eye-roll) would be bad news.
Together with the Boing Boing Video crew (Wes, Derek, Jolon) and the BB bloggers (Pesco, Cory, Joel, Mark, et al), we thought up a bunch of stuff we might do in the ads. We came up with lots of cool ideas, and shared them with Federated Media, who sell our sponsorships. But when all of those notions were laid out and storyboarded for video, none of them were sufficiently awesome, subversive, Boingy, or weird. So, I did what I usually do when I'm in that dilemma. I pick up my internet and I call Johannes Grenzfurthner of monochrom.
Fast forward to the end of a long, coffee-fueled phone call, me in LA, him in Vienna. monochrom agreed to produce the 6 ad spots for Boing Boing Video, but with one requirement -- they do so in the Alternate Reality of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, which is currently the subject of a game they are developing. Also, they will probably work Cheetos into the game, not because they or we are getting any money for that part, but because it's ridiculous and meta and whatever -- it's very Johannes.
Now Johannes didn't tell us exactly what they were going to shoot for the Cheetos ads. But he said that in order to shoot them, they urgently needed us to overnight them as many bags of Cheetos as possible, to Vienna, and do something clever on the customs form so that we would avoid problems with the tight-assed German or Austrian customs agents. I did all of that on Friday. I ran around LA buying Cheetos of every flavor and form factor (see snapshot above). I crammed them into plastic-lined FedEx boxes, drove to a big FedEx shipping center, and paid $140 to get $10 worth of Cheetos to Vienna by Monday morning.
I fudged a little bit on the customs form, to avoid the possibility of a food-related quarantine. I said they were "internet video props." Turns out German customs agents didn't like that much, and the boxes ended up being held in customs, because Frankfurt authorities thought they were drugs. There were many more phone calls to and from FedEx international agents, German customs, Austrian customs, and Monochrom. I am not lying. They thought Boing Boing Video was smuggling drugs to Austria.
As I type, the monochrom-bound Cheetos are still being held somewhere. I think we're going to have to pay a bunch of money to have them released. Johannes and his crew produced this first piece without them. When we saw the video, it was so insane, and the ordeal behind it so unreal, I don't know, I just felt like posting it solo was the right thing. Flame me in the comments if you disagree. But whatever you do, please watch it. Thanks to our sponsor for being rad. This is the part of the blog post where I say, "Cheetos Boredom Busters," and disclose to you that I am eating Cheetos at this very moment. And this is the part where I say, do svidanya, tovarishch.
# Stick it to The Man: Black paranoia is usually right in there. There's usually this conspiratorial thing that The Man is plotting your doom. There's a lot of real blaxploitation movies that involve a plot to exterminate black people. It's a constant storyline. In these movies, white people spend 95% of their time coming up with plots against black people.
# White people by the pool: Every one of those ['70s blaxploitation flicks] depicted white people beside a swimming pool. We actually had that scene, but we cut it. A lot of times they were older character actors.
# The exploding car off a cliff: Cars always exploded for no reason.
# Bad physics: When somebody got shot, they would often fall the wrong direction.
# Random theater actors: You had really terrible actors alongside these theater actors trying to be drug dealers, but they'd over-enunciate everything.
Update: Oh, Cory posted about this product 5 years ago! But I'll leave this new post up because a bunch of funny user comments have accrued on the Amazon listing, like so many happy barnacles on an ocean rock.
The excellent faux-educational brit comedy series "Look Around You" launches on Adult Swim this Sunday Jan 18th, at 1 am. (Thanks, Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz)
Our pals at MAD Magazine have given us a preview of this year's "MAD 20 - the 20 Dumbest People, Things and Events of the year." They asked if we wanted to leak one of 'em in advance of publication on Dec 16 and of course, I picked this delightful commentary on Dick Cheney's John McCain's campaign style.
Cinematic Titanic -- the creator-driven successor to the fantastic Mystery Science Theater 3000 -- has a new installment just in time for the holidays: this month, the guys kick the crap out of "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" (which has plenty of crap to kick!). For those of you who haven't been following this excellent series, the premise is simple: the five Cinematic Titanic comics are present in silhouette, superimposed over the picture, coming up with snappy jokes every second or so. I average about two belly laughs a minute, and about ten times more chuckles. The Cinematic Titanic guys are basically an artist-owned co-op who record and release this stuff off their own bat, direct to you at $15 a pop. Screw "It's a Wonderful Life," and to hell with the merely kitschy experience of watching "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" without commentary. It is only through the auspices of Cinematic Titanic that the holidays can truly be realized.
In this week's Boing Boing TVupdate, we discuss what's ahead with the launch of BOING BOING: OFFWORLD, and we speak with the YES MEN about their EPIC STUNT last week in which they printed and distributed lots and lots of copies of a New York Times fantasy-edition, with the headline IRAQ WAR ENDS. Mark blogged about this last week, with video.
We speak to three of the guys who made this event possible over a multi-channel iChat session that gets kind of melty sometimes. They are: Steve Lambert from the ANTI ADVERTISING AGENCY, Andy Bichlbaum from the YES MEN, and Scott Beibin from THE LOST FILM FEST. Some of those names might be aliases, who knows, caveat lector.
They say they received a cease and desist over email from HSBC over a parody HSBC ad that appears in both the print and online editions of their Faux NYT, but oddly, the C&D (they showed us a copy) is addressed to the REAL New York Times. We have not yet been able to confirm the lawyergram's validity with HSBC, but the email headers suggest it's legit.
And if you aren't busy Thursday night, come out for an extra-special Big Terrific with me and Gabe & Jenny. It's our last show until December, because believe it or not we won't be making jokes on the night of Thanksgiving. We'll be busy seeing who can eat the most oyster stuffing without passing out. Spoiler alert: it's me. Also joining us for this pre-holiday celebration: * LEO ALLEN (two Comedy Central specials, SNL) * KURT & KRISTEN (Flight of the Conchords, Comedy Central special) * JON FRIEDMAN (The Rejection Show) * MIKE O'CONNELL (in from LA; Jimmy Kimmel Live, YouTube sensation "What's It Gonna Be?")
We hope to see you there! It is always a very loose and fun and fresh time. There is a party afterwards. That's pretty chill.
Thursday, November 20th 2008 @ 8pm, Sound Fix Records 110 Bedford Ave., at N. 11th St. Brooklyn, NY 11211 FREE!
Hodgman himself describes this series as the dramatization of "true tale[s] of romance, adventure, infamy, and low-cost prescription drugs, all culled from the reams of actual, unsolicited emails, received here by us and people like you -- what we call SPAM."
Today's installment: Barrister Abbey and Diana Khan in "Wuthering Wire Transfers," a tempting tale of financial transactions and naked lust that requires your soonest response.
A note from our musical director: The adaptation of Jean-Joseph Mouret's "Rondeau: Fanfare" (1735) which opens today's episode was remixed in flagrante 8-bit by Hamhocks Buttermilk Johnson.
BBtv is launching a series of episodes featuring author, PC, and minor television personality John Hodgman, as the world waits breathlessly for the launch of his new book, MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE . We have read it, dear viewer, and it is splendid.
Today, the debut installment of Boing Boing tv's SPAMASTERPIECE THEATER, which Hodgman himself describes as the dramatization of "true tale[s] of romance, adventure, infamy, and low-cost prescription drugs, all culled from the reams of actual, unsolicited emails, received here by us and people like you -- what we call SPAM."
We'll be releasing more of these in the coming weeks. Each one is composed exclusively of actual, unadulterated, unsolicited email. Like virtual raw foodists, we would not think of cooking perfect fruit that falls so gracefully from the internet's tree of life.
We hope you enjoy. {fade to black, fade in Hodgman in the library chair, surrounded by spam ephemera }
Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with downloadable video and instructions on how to subscribe to our daily video podcast, which you really ought to do.
A note from our musical director: The adaptation of Jean-Joseph Mouret's "Rondeau: Fanfare" (1735) which opens today's episode was remixed in flagrante 8-bit by Hamhocks Buttermilk Johnson.
"As he gazed out of the ship's window to watch as his home island came into view once again, his eye caught a brief flicker of light reflecting off some unusual space debris. Quickly, he guided the ship close enough to retrieve the object with the electromagnet. Calling for the others to come, he climbed down to the observation room above the cargo bay. As the mangled piece of metal was being placed into the analysis chamber, he saw what had initially caught his eye: a small golden plaque with geometric symb..."
"why are we just allowing ourselves to pussy foot when being faced with hard core terrorists?
Why indeed? None of this mamby-pamby waterboarding stuff, lets bring back the rack, and thumbscrews. A short session with a lead boot would surely get us quality intelligence.
In fact, lets just do away with all that criminal coddling due process stuff while we're at it. After all, security from evil-doers is the highest good, isn't it? Put some REAL fear into the hearts of potential criminals and terrorists, tha..."
"The part that really stood out for me was not doing any promotion, or even nagging the publisher with questions about marketing and stuff. Getting a bestseller without so much as a signing at the local B&N! I didn't get the impression she was complaining, really, but you know what--if you want more dough, it's right out there if you want to hustle it...."
"One book a year seems about right to me, at least if the book is worth reading. It took me the better part of a year to *read* Infinite Jest, and honestly to do it justice I really should have read it twice.
..."
"I've noted that a lot of Glenn Beck-watching weapon-hoarding paranoid survivalist freakjobs are now explaining themselves with a wink and a nod with claims that they're actually preparing for a "zombie apocalypse". Notice how it sounds a lot better than "the coming race war"...."
"770-625. Your way: 0-5, can't do, borrow from the 7, add 10 to the 0, 15-5=5, 6-2=4, 7-6=1, read off the answer left to right: 145. This requires no understanding of place value, and for most people requires paper and pencil.
Students that have learned the filling 10s method can move on to filling 100's. For this problem, I need 75 more to get to 700, add that to 70 = 145. Very quick, very simple, deepens understanding of place value and number. I think learning the mental math techniques is very va..."
Kate Sheppard [of Mother Jones] was at the fake US Chamber of Commerce press conference in DC where a Yes Man, posing as a Chamber rep, claimed the Chamber was reversing its draconian position on climate change, which has caused lots of big Chamber members -- Apple, Nike, Exelon, and others -- to quit the national business group. But then a REAL Chamber PR man arrived at the meeting to declare it a fraud. (And Sheppard ended up on Maddow that night).
(via @
Our pals at MAD Magazine have given us a preview of this year's "MAD 20 - the 20 Dumbest People, Things and Events of the year." They asked if we wanted to leak one of 'em in advance of publication on Dec 16 and of course, I picked this delightful commentary on 
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