This might only be of interest to USC and Patriot fans (neither of which I am, by the way), but this video is what it looks like when a guy from Southern California gets angry.  Further proof that Russ is no Southern Californian, no matter where he lives at the moment.

This video completely knocked me on my ass. It is stunningly good. Couldn’t wait until Tuesday to post. Enjoy…

Via Greendot Films.

In this putrid economy, searching a job via the internet can be a very self destructive exercise. Application e-mails get lost in the void like so many pieces of space garbage, orbiting the neglected inbox of some pimply quasi-intern, who’s been tasked with the responsibility of reading through a thousand thousand pleas to be interviewed for the opening on the turd-polishing team.

Well, friends, seekers, here is the first tool in your toolbox to combat this trend. I give you the anti-rejection e-mail template:

———————————————————

Dear Overstressed Manager of Applications,

Your Name Here

Classic clip from my favorite comic (and soothsayer) of all time, Bill Hicks. Because of his heavily anti-commercial slant, he never got a great deal of mainstream media coverage. This is something that George Carlin was able to overcome, to some extent. But now they’re both gone, and we desperately need a like-minded voice…

By the way, the sound effect Hicks makes when he puts the mic inside his mouth is supposed to be the sound of pop stars selling out while fellating Satan.

Neat little timeline of the history of video games. A few glaring omissions include Intellivision (my first personal gaming system), Commodore 64 (a competitor in the cartridge gaming market), and Turbo Graphx 16 (the red-headed stepchild of the Super Nintendo). Also, the Super Nintendo pictured in the piece looks to me like a model of the Super Famicom, the Japanese counterpart.

A Short Visual History of Videogames from Kyle Downes on Vimeo.

I know I’m at risk of becoming a one-trick pony here in posting about news stories that are obvious and/or silly over and over, but hey – there’s been a flurry of same lately.

I could almost submit the above without comment, since it seems so self-evidently nonsensical to me. Does CNN think the nation was waiting, on pins and needles, for Hillary’s coin-toss decision between announcing that she would push for a smarter U.S. or a dumber U.S.? Did CNN have a potential article revved up in red “DEVELOPING STORY” border for Clinton announcing that she planned to sit on her duff for four years?

Or perhaps the only alternate headlines considered were “Clinton is this reporter’s personal favorite person alive” and “Clinton ‘could run for God’ in four years”.

Journalism, I miss you.

If you ever wonder why everything in the financial world is a stunning surprise and all results are different than expectations, this article should help you stop wondering.

In it, we learn that a worsening economy that lost 2.6 million jobs in a year, almost all of them in the last 6 months, could (mind that word now, could) lose 2.0 million jobs in the next year.

WHAT?

So, economists’ math goes like this:
-2,600,000 jobs
+worse job market
——————
-2,000,000 million jobs

Apparently, a “worse job market” means “600,000 jobs better than a better job market”.

And we wonder how things got this bad.

Greg’s post reminded me of an old gambit I used to have called The No-Crud Bureau. This was something I made up in high school as a receptacle for all the junk that people would come up with (often in academic studies) that was so obvious as to defy description. And was somehow instead passed off as a stunning revelation.

I guess these days it would more likely go by something like the No-Shit Show, but I didn’t swear at that point in my high school career. The swearing would come later, with the jading experiences and the pathological liar and the hey-hey-hey.

So my own submission to the Bureau today is this stunning study:
Apparently, misbehaving teens may be at risk for major adulthood problems.

Really?

Why would people who tend to have trouble continue to tend to have trouble? Isn’t it more likely that their trouble would suddenly vanish for no reason? Wouldn’t their magical conversion to the age of majority instantly convey a restart of all past indiscretions?

I’m glad people spent the money it costs to track 3,500 people for 40 years to give us this scintillating information. Much better than trying to cure cancer or something inane.

You may recognize this commercial. It plays roughly every 12 seconds on every major television network:

Anything this repetitive and oversimplified is bound to trip my Homer Simpson-esque “urge to kill, rising” mental switch.

A new and increasingly annoying twist is a remix of this advertisement featuring actors pretending to be ordinary people. They go through the motions singing the jingle, while self-inducing awkward fake laughter and mimicking general outtake-like behavior.

There are few ways to more poorly reproduce reality than to ask actors to play self-conscious, untrained, shlubs with a camera pointed at them. You see, most commercial grade actors are already self-conscious, untrained shlubs with a camera pointed at them.

Forcing people this vapid and shallow to look inward is a very dangerous exercise in existentialism. And irony-challenged television commercial directors probably aren’t the pioneers that we would choose to lead on this particular front.

My DVR is ill-equipped to fully insulate me from this garbage. Even fast forwarding through it makes me want to assume a sumo wrestling stance while shouting “FIVE, FIVE, FIVE, FIVE DOLLAH. FIVE DOLLAH!! FIVE DOLLAH FOOT LONG!,” at random passers by.

Please, if you have access to anyone that took part in producing any part of this commercial campaign, ask the bad men to stop.

Headbanging does create risk of brain damage, says study.

In related news: people who cut off one of their arms are one hundred percent more likely to have only one arm than those who don’t, scientists find.