Stuck Inside Due To Inclement Weather? Starting Bobbing!

In the interest of bringing you a quirky newsbit of the week, I scoured Youtube for fake Apple/Mac ads. The premise behind this: Everyone wants to be Apple (er, Google) or at the very least, win a chance to work for them. Plenty of parodies exist on the theme of the the Mac/PC guy. Some more memorable than others, but the best Apple ad of all time (and a REAL one, at that) remains the Orwellian commercial that came out around this time of season way back before Apple was Macintosh. In the interest of keeping with the 80s theme here: There’s something about growing up in the Max Headroom-inflicted era of the 80s and hearing, Music is my boyfriend [and girlfriend] alongside an electronica beat that I can’t help but swoon over.

As this clip, which integrates Mr. Bean, the Spice Girls, an iPod, iTunes, and Mac/PC illustrates, the tragic flaw of majority of the pseudo Mac ads is their lack of simplicity - the core ingredient to Apple’s success in advertising. Witnessing a few of these ads in succession makes one even more nostalgic and appreciative for the type of vision, clarity, and intent with which Apple creates their ads. So as a final follow up, the best fake Apple ad of the season is indeed the Wired toted disco Christmas ad with the Mac computer displays. But there is a hope for novice hacks out there: Companies that are able to capitalize on the success of Apple ads by piggybacking on those infamous light bulb Mac ideas and leveraging this popularity, have the best chance at creating memorable ads this holiday season.

So start creating and uploading to YouTube. Just keep the Muppets, Michael Jackson, and Columbine out of it.

The Conchords Take Flight

When I first saw the preview for HBO’s new slew of shows in their post-”Sopranos” vortex era of shows that have no chance of living up to the hype of their predecessor, I immediately was drawn to this imported Brooklyn hipster duo/ Alt-folk band of New Zealand brothers (in the namaste sense of the word) Bret & Jemaine, who are trying to make a go of their musical aspirations in New York.

The 12-episode series is performed in the same deadpan, sardonic parody-style of a Ricky Gervais production (”The Office,” “Extras”) with moments of awkward tension and bone-dry humor that are comedically so subtlly timed and well-executed that they are probably lost on the general American public. Nonetheless, these moments are filled with silly musical tunes that play of the situational irony of a scene. As Bret and Jemaine are musicians (both on and off-screen) this set-up works. Read More…

New York Times Poo Poos Bloggers

Since the dawn of time, NY Times owner has been b*tching and moaning about bloggers ruining his precious paper and sh*tting away revenue at the seams. Next week is the annual shareholder meeting for The Times and Gawker managed to weed through the report to give us all juicy snippets of the content and possible agenda items.

My favorite is this:

“The proliferation of nontraditional media, largely available at no cost, challenges the traditional media model, in which quality journalism has primarily been supported by print advertising revenues. If consumers fail to differentiate our content from other content providers, on the Internet or otherwise, we may experience a decline in revenues.”

Oh Sulzberger will you give it a rest already? Didn’t ya know that no one subscribes to, let alone buys that elitist line anymore? If you hadn’t yet noticed, your precious content smells the same as everyone else’s.

Striking a Warrior While Armed

Thoughts on the symbiotic rapport between yoga and guns courtesy Patton Oswalt, The New York Times Magazine:

You shoot better when you realize that your soul is a leaf falling through time, and that work shouldn’t equal struggle. And yoga never aligns you with the universe better than when your forearm is still tingling from the buck and recoil of a .357 bullpup.Someone needs to open a combination shooting range and yoga studio. I’m serious. Maybe I should do it. Hose off a few clips of Glaser safety slugs, then see how deep you can go into Warrior II. The murder rate would go down. No, wait — it would stay the same, but people would realize it’s all part of a bigger plan. Or, no, it would go up, because people would realize the transitory nature of existence, and that everything that has happened or is going to happen is always happening someplace forever, so why not put a slug in that dude’s head who won’t stop talking during “300”?

Rich People Don’t Defecate Like The Rest Of Us

Toilets have been on my mind a lot lately. Last week, I temped a job at Harvard University and noticed that the toilet had two levers for the flush, one for the big jobs and the other for smaller, more discreet ones. Unfortunately, I flushed multiple times defeating its purpose because I had no idea what the symbols actually meant. I had seen this type of contraption in Israel (where water is scarce), but never before in the U.S. so I made note of it.

Then the other night, I heard Jay Leno poke fun at the use of compost toilets, the energy-saving, environmentally green alternative to toilet paper. And suddenly these toilets are turning up everywhere. There’s even an entire site dedicated to it. Yesterday, as I waited 2.5 hours at the DMV to renew my driver’s license, I then read an article about celebrities practicing green living solutions (Earth Day is next month already after all). About the time I read about Pierce Brosnan and his wife owning one of these composters, I thought back to Leno’s apropos joke about a hose and a hair dryer being equally as effective as one of these $1600 machines. Moreover, can’t celebrities afford to hire people to wipe their own asses?

But the point is not the cost or the energy-conscious turn we’ve all taken since learning that world is going to melt into oblivion and Al Gore and his posse won’t be around to save us. It’s like those Chanel sunglasses or Fendi bags that women die to get originals of and eventually succumb to fake imposters. Simply put, disposing of our feces in environmentally conscious terms is now du jour. And that catch phrase that previously served as a social equalizer of sorts: Everyone’s shit smells the same. Well, it just doesn’t apply anymore because we’ve been irrigated before any stench could set in.

No one likes to talk about this kinda stuff. Frankly put (no pun intended) it stinks. But so does the self-righteous, moral high horse nonsense that goes along with those that use it. If I choose to write with the lights off in my apartment and let the natural light filter in (which happens more often that I like to admit), it’s not because I’m making a conscious decision to preserve energy. It’s cause I’m too lazy to put on a light. When I called my landlord to complain about heat being too high in the Winter it wasn’t because I was practicing an energy-saving practice, it was because I was burning up in there. Similarly, if I choose to buy crappy toilet paper, it’s cause it’s on sale and I can afford it.

Compost toilets feel elitist to me. Of course the high expenditure of the product lends itself to a certain yuppie demographic that plasters itself at will on the Sunday New York Times Home & Garden section in the hopes that all this plugging their proactive energy conscious lifestyles will later pan out when little Isabella (now 2) is on the waiting list at New York’s prestigious Dalton School.

As Mel Brooks would say, “It’s all bupkis.” And I know in the end, it is. It’s the whole stinking ride that gets to me sometimes though.

Like Biting Into Frank Bruni’s Eggy Lawn & Spewing Chodorow Chunks

New York Times Restaurant critic Frank Bruni may be on Chodorow’s “Most Wanted” list (ironic, when you think about it) and subsequently banned from all 29 of his establishments for poor restaurant reviews, but that hasn’t stopped Bruni from serving up more deliciously subversive takes on Chodorow venues, namely The Hotel Gansevoort’s unappealing brunch offerings.Bruni recently went undercover in NYC hotels to unearth all that’s grimy and sublime in the realm of food.

Beware: These reviews aren’t of the high-end luxury living magazine material. Oh, wait. Who are we kidding? This is The New York Times! There’s nothing too counter-culture here.

Gridskipper had a suggestion to make Bruni’s hotel jaunt a bit juicier. That is, than last week’s Village Voice interview on steaks.

By far though, the most fun of the Bruni report, (other than this stunningly helpful graphic) is a new sport we call, “Bruni For the Straight Guy” wherein one seeks out the gayest double entendre from the tastemaker’s repertoire.Option A:

But the stranger in my room at the London NYC hotel on a recent night had my full attention, because he was doing something I wasn’t at all accustomed to. He was crawling across the floor and under the coffee table.

Option B:

The food will arrive at the most inopportune moment, e.g., when you’ve just decided to try on the odd leopard-print robe hanging in the bathroom at the Muse Hotel in Midtown.

We’re going to go with Option A which seems lifted straight out of a Craigslist Casual Encounters post, albeit a delicious well-written well-poached one.

I’d opt for Option B. It’s got that bold element of reality wrapped up in fiction with a twist of the absurd. Tart, but well worth the intake.